this little world - Chapter 10

The Viking

I had been hearing the poetry of English place names every night. I spent my evenings scouring maps for new examples of this wonderful phenomenon. I heard them like a litany.

Wetwang , Williton
Galloping Bottom.
Pity Me, Sewersby
Herbert’s Hole.
Scrooby, Crugmeer
Unthank, Scurlage
Coxhoe, Poxwell
Grunty Fen

Ever since Norwich I had been building a list, which started when I had heard a local say.
"There’s something going up Brightys Opening!" which meant a lorry had driven up the street just around the corner. At first I simply enjoyed the comic poetry of the names. But as I went on further and further into England I realised that each village name tells a story as well.

Even the most casual of glances over a map of England shows that the types of names given to villages vary greatly throughout the country. I came to be fascinated by the variety of names. There are the ‘ton’ and the ‘don’ names of Anglo-Saxon England, the ‘try’s and ‘by’s places in the eastern counties that remember Scandinavian invaders and then there are Celtic names that begin with Tre- in Cornwall. The names are clues to the settlement of England, of the retreat to the west of the Celts and of the Vikings raids which resulted in Danish farmers settling the East, celebrated in names like Bigby at the foot of the Lincolnshire Wolds.

English place names contain more than just a generalised outline of who settled where though. In the places that were once covered in trees you can hear in names like ‘Brinley’( meaning ‘the burnt clearing’) the farmers firing woodland to create the fields you can still see today. In the places that once were marsh you can hear the sound of rushes. All those ‘Ship’ names of the Cotswolds remind you of the bleating of sheep. Here in the east of England you can even hear the name of an individual Viking who came off of his ship with his shield on his back and settled this part of England a thousand years ago.

Listen and you can hear them calling - I am Grimr son of Gunni, thane of Grimsby.

All the time I had been walking through the Fens I had not been able to shake the idea from my head that I was not walking on dry land. The endless drains and sea banks nagged away at my subconscious. My dreams at night had been full of boats, rowing slowly above the mud. It felt deeply wrong in some way to walk through fields which were once soft marsh. However, when I stepped out onto the street in Woodhall Spa next morning my instincts reassured me that the ground was truly solid. Solid like my B and B’s English breakfast. I felt confident and slapped my overfull stomach before rolling like a barrel out onto the main street.

I had come to Woodhall Spa to pick up the northern part of the Viking Way. A cursory inspection of the people on the street however revealed that despite their noble ancestry, from Canute and his company, no one was now sporting winged helmets and battle axes. In fact with my raggedy three week beard I was the one that looked like Eric Bloodaxe. I set-off, a lone Viking on a solitary raid.

I got excited that morning as the ground rose around Horncastle. Probably under any other circumstance I would have described it as being level, but here it appeared to have a profile. The land became three dimensional again. I was out of the Fenland walking up on to the Lincolnshire Wolds.

An archetypal wold is a rolling green hill whose grass has been cropped short by the grazing of sheep. Its a type of farming that has become less common now and what I saw mostly in this part of Lincolnshire were arable farms, with the occasional patch of grass on the slopes that had escaped from being ploughed. I did not really care whether what I was seeing was traditional. The Fens had converted me to the worship of hills.

The sun was shining next morning. I was happy and I whistled to myself ‘O what a beautiful morning’, a recipe for bringing on the rain, which sure enough fell in buckets by the end of the day.

From Tealby to Walesby and then onto Normanby-le-Wold the path weaved its way up and down the very edge of the Wolds. The pinks and blues of the gardens of the villages looked like cut flower arrangements placed in their bowls below the line of the escarpment. My eyes feasted on the gentle contours and my legs wanted to run down the sides of the hills.

It was Sunday and finally I met someone else walking in Lincolnshire. I spent some time talking to some ramblers from Lincoln admiring the church on the hill above Walesby. The view then vanished and I was walking on my own in the wind and the rain.

I fought to keep myself going. The happiness of the morning quickly melted in the rain. The blisters from the Fens burst as I walked. I fought to keep my ghosts at bay.

It was on this day of the walk that I learnt to distract myself. Outloud, I recited the names of places from Bedfordshire - Stewartby, Houghton, Mouldon, Clopton. It was harder than I thought to recite them in order and I left places out. I tried to decipher what all the names meant.

I remember the very last leg of this day as a slippery meander. A focus-less stumble across wet ploughed fields. My vision blurred , my glasses steamed up, I blundered into fence hidden by the murk. I passed through a series of like sounding names...Clixby, Grasby, .....more Viking wannabees. This Viking had had enough of wandering about in the rain. I squinted off into the drizzle at what I thought were two bird scarers. I picked out the faces of people coming towards me. Pauline and our friend Judith came dripping out of the gloom.

I put a happy face on for my audience. I called

"Farewell the Fens, next stop The North."

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