Sheffield and Peak District Place Names, and What They Mean
Most place names around Sheffield and the Peak are short descriptions in a language nobody speaks any more. Somebody stood in a valley a thousand years ago and called it what it was: the field by the boundary river, the farm by the alders, the gateway, the hill like a mother. Learn a dozen of the old words and the map starts talking. This is a guide to the commonest pieces and to some of the best names they make, from Sheffield and Hallam out to Kinder and Mam Tor.
The building blocks
Most of the names here are Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, with some Old Norse from the Danes and Norwegians who settled the north, and the odd word older than either. A handful of endings do most of the work:
- -ley, from Old English léah: a woodland clearing. Loxley, Wadsley.
- -field, from feld: open land, or a clearing in a forest. Sheffield, Ecclesfield, Bradfield.
- -ton, from tún: an enclosure, an estate, a homestead, pronounced “toon” and the ancestor of “town”. Owlerton, Stannington, Castleton.
- -low, from hláw: a rounded hill. Arbor Low, Kinder Low. (In Peak dialect “low” still means a hilltop.)
- -worth: an enclosure. -ham: a farm or homestead. -ford: a crossing.
- -thorpe, Old Norse: an outlying settlement, a daughter village of an older one. -by, also Norse: a village. -thwaite, Norse again: a clearing with a dwelling in it.
- -dale, both Old English and Norse: a valley.
Sheffield and Hallam
Sheffield is the open land by the Sheaf, and the Sheaf itself is a boundary river: its name comes from an old word for “divide”, as in “watershed”. It was the line between the Northumbrians and the Mercians, and it gives the city a name that means, more or less, “the field on the border”. The liminality guide follows that idea further.
Hallam, the old name for the country around the city, is first written down in Domesday Book as “Hallun”. Nobody is sure what it means. The English Place-Name Society links it to a phrase meaning “on the rocks”. Other suggestions are halgh, a border area, Old Norse hallr, a slope, and Old English heall, a hall. Hallamshire is the shire, or district, of Hallam.
Dore, on the southern edge, is a doorway. The name probably shares its Old English root with “door”, in the sense of a gateway, though a Welsh word for water has also been suggested. It earned the name. In 829 (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle files it under 827), Egbert of Wessex led an army north “as far as Dore”, where the Northumbrians met him and submitted, and the episode is the basis for calling Egbert the first king of all England. The Limb Brook, the Sheaf and the Meers Brook were the border. The liminality guide has more on Dore as the door between two kingdoms, and the moor above it has a rock called the Giant’s Chair, which turns up in the Devil in the northern landscape.
Around S6
Loxley is the best known of them, and its meaning is argued over. The popular reading is lox, the lynx, and léah, a glade: the lynx glade. The place-name scholars prefer a person: Locc, an Old English name found in other place names and on coins, making it “Locc’s forest-glade”. The village is first written down in 1329, as Lokkeslay. The more familiar “Locksley” spelling comes with Robin Hood: Roger Dodsworth wrote of a “Robert Locksley” in the 1630s, and Walter Scott made the outlaw Robert of Locksley in Ivanhoe in 1820 (more in the Barnsdale and Robin Hood guide). Wadsley, in Domesday Wadesleia, is the clearing of someone called Wad, Wadde, Wade or Wada, possibly a real person and possibly a figure of myth. Owlerton is thought to come from the alders that grew thick there. Hillsborough is the newcomer: it is named after Hillsborough House, built in 1779 and named as a compliment to the Earl of Hillsborough, who lived at Hillsborough in County Down. So a Sheffield suburb is named, at one remove, after a town in Ireland.
Ecclesfield is older than the English. Its first part is traditionally read as a Celtic word, egles, a church, and specifically a Romano-British one, plus feld. If that is right, the name remembers a British church that stood there before the English arrived. Some prefer a personal name, or something to do with water. Attercliffe, Domesday’s Ateclive, is simply “at the cliff”, after a small escarpment along the Don. Grenoside has been read as “quarried hollows”, though nobody has proved it.
Out into the Peak
The Peak itself is Péaclond, hill country, and has its own guide: why it’s called the Peak District. Kinder appears in Domesday as Chendre, probably from a language older than English, while Scout is Norse skúte, an overhanging rock. Mam Tor is the mother hill, because the landslips on its face have given birth to a crowd of little hills below it.
Bakewell is nothing to do with baking. It is the spring or stream of a woman called Badeca or Beadeca, written Badecanwelle in 949 and Badequelle in Domesday. Buxton is less certain: in the 12th century it was Buckestones, possibly the buck stone or the rocking stone, and later Kyngesbucstones, once the king owned it. Hathersage is disputed too, except for its ending, Old English ecg, an edge. Edale was Aidele in 1086, and its hamlets are called booths, such as Barber Booth and Grindsbrook Booth, because they started in the 13th century as vaccaries, cattle farms. Chapel-en-le-Frith is Anglo-Norman for “chapel in the forest”, the Forest of High Peak, where the Normans first put a hunting lodge.
From place names to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, keeps the map and reads it more literally. Whatever Locc was, the Loxley still has its kraken, and the open ground of Wadsley Common has the Bracken Man of Wadsley Common. In Hellsborough, place names have a habit of becoming people’s names, which is a story for the guide to Sheffield surnames. The words people use there are in the guide to Sheffield dialect, and the real places behind it all are in the S6 field guide. Foked is the free solo RPG set on that ground. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: the place-name elements from Wikipedia’s list of generic forms in British place names; the Sheaf from Wikipedia; Hallam from Wikipedia; Dore and Egbert from Wikipedia; Loxley’s first record, Locc and Scott’s Locksley from the International Robin Hood Bibliography’s Loxley entry; Dodsworth from Wikipedia; Loxley as the lynx glade, Wadsley, Owlerton, Hillsborough, Ecclesfield, Attercliffe and Grenoside from Wikipedia’s articles on Loxley, Wadsley, Owlerton, Hillsborough, Ecclesfield, Attercliffe and Grenoside; Kinder from Wikipedia; Mam Tor from Wikipedia; Bakewell, Buxton, Hathersage, Edale and Chapel-en-le-Frith from Wikipedia’s articles on Bakewell, Buxton, Hathersage, Edale and Chapel-en-le-Frith.
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