Pity Me, and Other Places

There is a village in County Durham called Pity Me. There is a parish in Somerset called Nempnett Thrubwell. There is a town in Devon called Westward Ho!, with the exclamation mark, which it was named after a novel and has had to live up to ever since. I knew all of these before I worked in names, the way everybody knows them, as small jokes the country tells about itself. I did not know, until I started, that every one of them had been written down, at some point, by a person whose job it was to make sure it was spelled right.

For eleven years, that person was sometimes me.

The Survey has always cared about names. In the early days, the surveyors kept Name Books: great ledgers in which every name on the sheet was written out, with its spelling, a description of the thing it named, and, crucially, its authorities, the people who had been asked. The vicar. The landowner. The schoolmaster. An old man at the mill. If the authorities disagreed, which they often did, the disagreement went into the book as well, and somebody somewhere had to decide.11Some of the old Name Books have been digitised. If you ever need to lose an afternoon, look up a village you know and see who was asked about it in 1850-something, and what they said.

By the time I joined the names section, the ledgers were long gone and most of the work was at a desk, checking, correcting, cross-referencing. But now and again a name was disputed badly enough that somebody had to go and stand in the place and ask, and because I was the one who had once complained about never being sent anywhere, it was often me.

What I learned, very quickly, is that a place does not have a name. It has a cloud of them.

The first time I was sent out properly was to a farm in West Penwith, not far from where I live now. The sheet showed one of the farm’s fields with a name, and a letter had arrived saying the name was wrong. I drove down, and the farmer walked me out to the field, and we stood in it, and I asked what it was called.

He looked at it for a while, as if it might tell him. Then he said that his father had called it Gweal Gwyns, the windy field, and his wife called it the top field, and his son called it the one with the gate that doesn’t shut, and the man who rented it for sheep called it Number Four. “So what do you want to know?” he said. “What it’s called, or what it’s called by me?”

I didn’t have an answer. I wrote all of them down, which is what you do when you don’t have an answer, and drove back to Southampton with five names for one field and the slightly giddy feeling that I had been let in on something.

The map, of course, could only take one. It took Gweal Gwyns, because it was the oldest and the most widely known and because it was already there, and because the letter-writer turned out to be a neighbour with a long-running grievance about the gate. But the other four didn’t stop existing because the map declined them. They went on living exactly where they had always lived, which is in people’s mouths.

Here in Cornwall the names come with their own grammar. There is an old rhyme, By Tre, Pol and Pen, shall ye know the Cornishmen, and it is more or less true. Tre is a farmstead or a settlement; pol is a pool; pen is a head, an end, a top. Half the places round here are a small description of themselves in a language that stopped being spoken at the kitchen table a long time ago. Chyandour, the house by the water. Porthcurno, the cove of the horns. Penzance, the holy headland. You can walk around West Penwith reading the landscape back to itself.22Mousehole, two miles down the road, is pronounced Mowzel, and if you say it any other way people will be kind to you in a way that makes it clear they have noticed.

My own name is one of them. Pen and hallow: the head of the moor, or the end of it, depending on whom you ask. Somebody, five or six hundred years ago, lived at the top of some rough ground, and was called after it, and the name came loose from the place and wandered off down the generations until it ended up in a desk drawer in Southampton on a pass card. I have been to the moor. There is nothing there now; there was probably very little there then. It is strange and pleasant to find yourself named after a view.

I don’t think I understood, until I was out of the job, how much of the work was choosing. Every name on a map is a winner. It beat the other names in the cloud, for reasons that were sometimes good and sometimes merely administrative, and once it was printed it acquired a kind of authority it hadn’t had before. People started using it because it was on the map. Visitors used it, then estate agents, then the council. The cloud thinned. Sometimes I suspect that we didn’t so much record names as finish them off.

So these days I collect the losers. I keep a notebook, an actual paper one, of the names round here that will never make a sheet: the bench on the harbour wall that everybody calls Ivy’s, though nobody I’ve asked remembers an Ivy; the slipway the children call the Drop; the bend in the coast path that the dog walkers call Hat Corner, for reasons involving a gust and a man from Bristol in 1997. They are small and local and some of them will be gone in a generation. That is fine. That is what names do.

But I like to think that if somebody from the Survey came to my door with a ledger, and asked me what the bench was called, I would give them all of the names at once, and watch their face, and say: what do you want to know?