Most of us who have wandered through the Kent Downs whether on foot, by horse, bicycle or car will have, at one time or another, pondered over the meaning of place names of towns , villages or hamlets that we normally take for granted in our everyday lives. Places such as Pett Bottom, Bigbury and Bobbing conjure up all manner of intriguing images as to the activities of former inhabitants, while others such as Whatsole Street, Smersole or Hartlip appear completely baffling. Indeed when a recent travelling companion of mine enquired into the female population count of the villages of Womenswold and Old Wives Lees I decided it was high time to dispel his belief that these places were rural retreats for eligible women and instead decided to investigate..............

Although most place names may appear at first sight to be random elements of words thrown together in no particular order, most are surprisingly easy to decipher with some elementary grounding in Old English. Over the centuries most of the Old English words have themselves corrupted and changed to appear as we know them today.

Unsurprisingly many place names stem from geographical features such as woods, springs, fords, hills and valleys that could be used to identify a particular place. The suffix ‘bourne’ obviously denotes the presence of a bourne or small stream as in Bekesbourne while ‘wald’ or ‘wode’ would denote ‘wood’. Old Wives Lees for example first appears in 1278 as Ealdewode meaning ‘old wood’. By 1610 it had become Old Wyves Lease and from then it’s present form as Old Wives Lees.

Other places are derived from names for settlements or property frequently combined with personal names. Paddlesworth for example started life as ‘Pellesorde’ in 1086 meaning ‘Paeddels enclosure’. The suffix ‘’ham’ as in Alkham or Lenham on the other hand derives from the Old English for ‘settlement’.

Similarily the suffix ‘inge’ or ‘ing’ commonly found in Kent Downs place names such as Lyminge , Ottinge, Selling and Charing usually indicates a tribe or people belonging to an individual. Thus ‘Otta’s’ people is Ottinge and ‘Ceorra’s people’ is now Charing.

One of the commonest elements in Kentish place names is the suffix ‘stead’. This is thought to derive from the Old English for stock farm. Kent has a particularly high number of ‘Steads or ‘Steds ‘ when compared with other counties and what is all the more surprising is that most of these ‘steads’ are situated in the Downs area. Some believe that the reason for this lies in the pattern and phases of settlement in Kent that occurred in the past. Take a good look at many of these ‘steads or ‘sted’s’ and you’ll notice that many of these villages often comprise simply a church , manor house or courtlodge and a scattering of houses. There is reason to think that many of these characteristically small parishes simply evolved as outlying stock farms of primary settlements elsewhere in river valleys for example. They were probably established in clearings of the Downland wooded landscape and then at a slightly later date became independent holdings perhaps worked by the younger sons of the old community driven to seek a separate livelihood of their own. Rather than being founded as settlements of a community they were simply farmsteads of a single family or landowner and in this sense were ‘manorial’ in origin, with their churches standing isloated by the court lodges or manor houses as at Elmsted for example.

Next time you travel around the Kent Downs see if you can work out the meaning and the history of the places you visit.