h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I did not know, until I saw this old map and did a few further searches, that there was a strange Devon ‘island’ within Dorset until 1842.

See the map here, the ‘enclave’ was just above and to the east of Axminster.

http://www.yourmapsonline.org.uk/maps_for_web/Devonshire/Devonshire.jpg

A book called White’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Devon (1850) says;

“THORNCOMBE, a village and a parish, nearly 6 miles N.E. of Axminster, was formerly a detached part of Devon, but was given to Dorsetshire by act of parliament in 1842 in exchange for Stockland and Dalwood.”

Another source says;

“A relative newcomer to West Dorset, Thorncombe was until 1844 part of the county of Devon. The main reason for the transfer being that some 10 years earlier the church had transferred the parish to the Dioceses of Salisbury which at that time contained the whole county of Dorset.”

Why would a part of Devon be ‘detached’ in Dorset? It more like what you see at the borders of countries, where strange ethnic enclaves persist, like at Llivia which is a tiny enclave Spanish territory inside France.

http://www.grenspalen.nl/llivia/llivia-in-english.html

It is like this situation occurred at the Devon and Dorset border hundreds of years ago, and then was dissolved when any real cultural reason for its continued existence had vanished into history, leaving behind only, by 1842, a bizarre county border arrangement of a ‘part of Devon’ as an island in Dorset that was resolved by the act of parliament.

These "detached parishes" were fairly common until they were abolished in the 19th century. Not sure of the history behind them, I think it had something to do with medieval manorial arrangements and land-grabs by various lords of the manor.

It does appear that quite a few counties did have "detached" parts.

This link gives some of the major ones.

http://www.abcounties.co.uk/counties/map.htm

The most visually interesting (or fragmented) seem to be Flintshire in Wales, Dumbartonshire in Scotland, and Worcestershire in England.

It makes you wonder how these fragmented areas came to be.... As nxylas indicates perhaps it came down to local empire building.

For those who propose that the word "shire" demonstrates that the area is traditionally English, one only has to look to Scotland and Wales to realise that this is not so.

All bar three of the Welsh counties are called "shire", and in Scotland they are clearly in the majority.

Devon is shown as just that - Devon.

Of course there are other traditional Devon 'enclaves' which defy the normal logic on county boundaries.

Tradition indicates that Athelstan set the boundary between Devon and Cornwall at the Tamar, but that rule has not always applied.

For example Kingsand and part of Millbrook (on the west of Plymouth Sound) was a part of Devon until 1844 (which is the same date as the Dorset land)

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/Cornwall/Maker/

Further north North Petherwin was also a part of Devon despite being west of the Tamar - a situation which continued as recently as 1966 [I hadn't realised it had changed hands at all].

http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/DEV/NorthPetherwin/

It is not all one way however, as slightly further north again there is a small part of Cornwall that is east of the Tamar - part of North Tamerton.

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/Cornwall/NorthTamerton/

Bridgerule, further north again seems to be yet another exception to this rule.

http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/DEV/Bridgerule/

The existence of the Devon ‘enclave’ interested me because it lay in an area that, approximately, had been first the location of a Celtic tribal boundary between the Dumnonii and the Durotiges and, later on, the easterly frontier of Dumnonia with Wessex. I can’t find any explanation for the Devon detached part’s existence as yet, so for now I will go for Nxylas’s explanation of it being some landholding arrangement of later origin, seeing as that was the case in many other of these detached areas.

There is, however, another oddity from one of these old maps that I hope someone can clear up. I was looking at this 1769 map of the Cornwall-Devon border and found something I could not explain.

Take a look at the very last picture of the map shown on the page;

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~genmaps/genfiles/COU_files/ENG/DEV/kitchin_dev_1769.html

To the left, just east of Stratton in Cornwall and on the Devon side of the Tamar, to the north of Holsworthy and Sheepwash, there is a settlement clearly marked as ‘Trehoro’.

I was interested in its Cornish-sounding name and that it was shown as being on the Devon side of the Tamar, and whether it had changed hands between the two counties. I had never heard of Trehoro before and looked for its name on the internet but found no references to it whatsoever, either in Devon or Cornwall. I also tried alternative spellings, like Trehorrow, but with no results.

I appreciate the map is very old, the spellings outdated, and that geographically it is not very accurate, but all the other settlements shown around ‘Trehoro’ still exist today in approximately the locations shown, with names almost the same as those shown on the map.

Does this place still exist, and if so, what is it called now, and where is it?

>>For those who propose that the word "shire" demonstrates that the area is traditionally English, one only has to look to Scotland and Wales to realise that this is not so.<<

And who has proposed that? Certainly not me, I just said that a shire is a subdivision of a larger kingdom, which is why it is significant that Devon formerly bore the "-shire" suffix and Cornwall didn't. The stuff about Flintshire and Aberdeenshire etc. was just smoke and mirrors to divert attention away from a piece of evidence which y'all obviously regard as pointing to the "wrong" conclusion.

EVB,

I have not heard of Trehoro before and neither can I find it on a current map.

However it would appear that the stream it lies beside is the Waldon. The prefix "Wal" is usually associated with British settlements, and the "don" might refer to the British word for a fort.

The obvious Celtic look of Trehoro and the name of the stream may therefore be related.

As to the use of the word shire I hadn't thought specifically of you Nick - although I do know that the argument comes from your side of the fence.

The comment was perhaps michievious.

Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the names Devon and Devonshire long competed in common usage. It reminds me a little of the Northern Irish "Londonderry" and "Derry" (depending on whether you are unionist or republican).

However it is also interesting to note that of those english counties that are not formally suffixed with shire many come from the south and south west (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset,...across to Kent - with the exception of Hampshire). There are one or two others on the east coast and in the far north, but not many.

ExeValleyBoy,

The name ‘Trehoro’ definitely looks like the name of a lost place. Such names do occur, others in Devon being: ‘Odencolc’, near Thurlstone, (attested to be derived from the Brythonic ‘odn-calch’), ‘Peon Mynet’, near Culmstock, (attested to be derived from the Brythonic ‘penn-monidh’), and another lost ‘tre’ name that I recently discovered near Tavistock, i.e. ‘Trendle’.

There are other ‘tre’ place-names in the North West of Devon, namely ‘Trellick’ (near Hartland) and ‘Trewyn’ (at Holsworthy).

The occurrence of ‘tre’ place-names in Devon is not at all rare, as there are at least 30+ such names, spread all over the county. Most of these appear on the 1:50,000 scale OS maps, but some are only to be found on the 1:25,000 series maps. As I do not posses the complete series of 1:25,000 scale maps for Devon (yet), there may well be some ‘tre’ names that I have not yet discovered.

Dear All

Thought I might chip in.

As Ozzie Exile states, there were a large amount of "detached" bits of counties in Great Britain, the obvious one I'd say was Barrow in Furness as part of Lancashire. There are detached bits of countries (a Belgian town entirely surrounded by the Dutch countryside, a Spanish town in France) in Europe. These are historical accidents and as Nyxlas points out are nearly all remnants of the feudal period. Though how the carefully arranged French departments which were drawn with such loving care at the time of the revolution created a bit of Vauclause (84) in Provence Alpe Cote d'Azure to be entirely surrounded by Drome (26) Rhone Alpes is beyond me.

Secondly the use of -"shire" in Scotland and Wales is easily explained by use of history. The historic Welsh counties were created as part of the Acts of Union of the 1530s under Henry "which wife will I kill today" the eighth. They were generally created on the same pricipal as most English counties, ie named after the local seat of power, except where there was a perfectly usable name (Anglesey and Glamorgan). The shire (Caernarfonshire, Pembrokeshire) was added to create a differentiation between the town and the hinterland. The Welsh for county is "Sir" pronounced "Shir". Hence the signs etc stating Cyngor Sir Caerdydd - Cardiff County Council. It entered the language 450 years ago. The old names have been restored thanks to local government reorganisation in 1996. The counties with the Welsh names, Dyfed, Gwynedd, Clwyd, Powys and Gwent were created in 1974. Only Powys survives intact (Breconshire, Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire) and Gwynedd Council adopted Gwynedd as its name in 1996 because the name proposed by the then Welsh Office - Caernarfonshire and Meirionyddshire County Borough Council - wouldn't really fit on letterheads. Imagine saying that every time you answer the phone in English AND Welsh? Yr Cyngor Gwynedd Gwynedd Council is so much easier.

Now for Scotland. Virtually none of the historic counties and only ONE of the current single tiers has a Gaelic name - An Comharle nan Eileann Siar - Western Isles Council. The historic names have been prefered. Some of the names are Gaelic in origin, I grant you, but heavily Anglisised. The Scottish counties werew created back before the Bruce and Wallace. Scots Law 101, Sherriffs in Scotland still have judicial powers and are judicial appointments. English and welsh Sherriffs, from whence the term shire derives, have lost them. The seat of each Shrivalty became its shire. The Sherriff of Lanark had jurisdiction over Lanarkshire, of Perth over Perthshire. Once again there were anomalies in the system, but non shire names have no link to a town name. And West Lothian, Midlothian and East Lothian have been recorded as Linlithgowshire, Edinburghshire and Haddingtonshire. The latter still in low level use. But the use of shire is linked to the term Sherriff in Scotland, rather than Sherriff getting the title (Shire Reeve) from the land in England. Every county in England has a sherriff. The main distinction being if the county derives its name from its seat = shire, if not shire is not used. The title of county is also simply land ruled by an Earl (Count) from the French.

Historically the use of Devonshire is as erroneous as Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, all of which exist in the records. No one I know in Devon uses Devonshire as the county name. in fact the use by outsiders is like refering to Scots as Scotch, archaic and likely to cause a sharp intake of breath. If Devon was to have been a -shire county, it would have been Isconshire (or variant) Exetershire in modern parlance. As Ozzie Exile said about Derry/Londonderry to paraphrase, you pays your money and takes yer pick. I use Devon, my family uses Devon, and even in dialect Debm seems to be prefered to Demshir. And arent we forgetting the two other suffixes for counties in England -folk and -sex? And i thought the Anglo Saxons were meant to have a hang up about the latter (!)

I hope this rant is of use in the arguement. Lack of or possesion of a shire suffix does not denote the cultural identity of the inhabitants at creation of same, but that Devon, Cornwall, Kent SURVIVED as place names indicates a sense of identity. These "Anglo Saxon" county names have survived longer than Dalriada, the Gaelic founder territory of a Gaelic state. It is now Argyllshire. And if it is meant to be Devonshire, why is there living in Powderham Castle the Earl of Devon. it has always been simply Devon in the title in all it's titular families. (The Duke of Devonshire was meant to be the Duke of Derbyshire, but someone could not spell!)

Here endeth the lesson.

tb

Blimey, replying to my own messages now. Just while I remember and am still on a roll, note that all the street names and hotels etc named "Devonshire" are so named after His Grace the Duke's noble forebears and NOT God's Own Acre. It is possible we got stuck with the suffix because of the Cavendish family enoblement.

And I am still trying to find a believable link between the River Devon (in Clackmananshire and Perthshire, and our fair county.

tb

Plymouth Exile,

Thank you for the list of lost Devon place names. Where did you read about them, as I would like to find out more; like how and when they disappeared? An internet search did not reveal anything so far.

The Devon place names beginning with ‘Tre’ I find most interesting are those that appear to combine the ‘Tre’ element with an English word. Near Sampford Courtenay is a tiny hamlet called Trecott, and a couple of miles south of that, a farm called Trehill.

It might be argued that both names are completely English and that the 'tre' is actually a form of ‘tree’ or something similar I am seeing. But I found occurrences of Trehill in Cornwall, where it is highly unlikely the name would be regarded as English.

Regarding Trecott, it has been suggested here that some 'cott' names in Devon may have disguised Celtic roots, and the 'cott' is not Old English, but the Celtic word 'coet' or 'coed', meaning wood.

While I don't think all Devon 'cotts' are Celtic, it seems more likely with Trecott. Such an arrangement exists today with Trecoed in Wales.

Or maybe Trecott and Trehill are a mixture of both languages; coming from a time when people in this part of Devon were still speaking Old Cornish, but had taken English words into their speech.

P.S. Thanks to TivvyBoy for answering many questions I had about shire counties.

ExeValleyBoy,

The first two ‘lost Devon place-names’ (‘Odencolc’ and ‘Peon Mynet’) were from “Celtic Voices English Places” by Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze (2000). Coates gives no indication of how these names were lost, but I would suspect that they were probably abandoned farms or hamlets. The third ‘Trendle’ was a late Celtic settlement, which was in existence before the town of Tavistock came into being (now marked by earthworks). There are a few web sites concerning Trendle, which can be accessed by entering ‘Trendle’ and ‘Tavistock’ as search criteria in a search engine.

There are at least two instances of Trehill (the other is near Plymouth), and these could either be cases of the English word ‘hill’ being added to ‘tre’ at a later date, or of an owner named ‘Hill’ adding his name to the place. As you correctly state, the ‘hill’ suffix has also been used in Cornwall.

The instance of ‘Trecott’ could be a case of ‘tre-coet’ as there is a small wood close by, but we will probably never know for certain.

The three cases of ‘tre’ names mentioned by Coates and Breeze are those mentioned in the “Place Names of Devon” volumes of 1931-2. These were ‘Treable’ (from ‘tre-ebil’, the suffix being identified by Breeze as a stream name), ‘Trebick’ (from ‘tre-bicc’, meaning ‘small farm’), and ‘Trellick’ (the suffix being identified as a personal name).

In my list, there are four instances of ‘Tredown’, which could well be from ‘tre-dun’, meaning ‘farm by the hillfort’. There are four instances of ‘Trew’, which could be from ‘tre-iw’, as Coates cites ‘-iw’ as being a place-name forming suffix. The single instance of ‘Treby’ almost certainly has the same derivation as ‘Trebick’ (‘small farm’), and at the opposite end of the scale, ‘Tremar’ is almost certainly ‘tre-mur’, meaning ‘large farm’. The name ‘Trevenn’ (near Lamerton) looks very similar to the old name for the Cornish town of Tintagel, which was ‘Trevena’, from ‘tre-menydh’ (with mutation of ‘m’ to ‘v’), meaning ‘farm on a hill’ (according to Padel). The same derivation for the Devon name ‘Tevenn’ looks to be likely, as close to it is another farm with the modern English name of ‘Lower Hill Farm’. Another ancient ‘tre’ name is ‘Trewyn’ at Holsworthy, which has an obvious derivation of ‘tre-winn’, meaning ‘white farm’. West of Holsworthy is ‘Trelana’, which looks to be the equivalent of the Cornish place-name ‘Trelan’ from ‘tre-lann’, meaning ‘farm on a monastic site’ (Padel). There is corroborating evidence for this derivation of the Devon name, in that there is an adjacent place-name ‘Monks’.

I think it is important to not just take the derivations of Devon place-names at face value. Often the most likely derivation is the one, which is geographically descriptive of the site. Also, nearby place-names, whether they are Brythonic or English, can give important clues.

Plymouth Exile,

Thanks for the source of the lost place names.

You said;

“I think it is important to not just take the derivations of Devon place-names at face value. Often the most likely derivation is the one, which is geographically descriptive of the site. Also, nearby place-names, whether they are Brythonic or English, can give important clues.”

I agree, as I was interested in the place name of Clovelly, which is alleged to be of Celtic origin.

Here is one suggestion by Richard Coates;

“Coates, Richard. Clovelly, Devon, English Place Name Society Journal, vol. 28, (1996) pp.36-44. [Concludes: “it can be proposed with some confidence that Clovelly is a Cornish name meaning ‘earthworks associated with Fele(c)’, a person whose name may survive unadorned in the ancient farms and vanished chapel called Velly”]

I then found this source from 1850, which gives two spellings of Clovelly;

“CLOVELLY, or Clovelleigh, is a pleasant village and fishing station, occupying a singular and picturesque situation... [W. White. History, Gazeteer, and Directory of Devonshire, 1850]”

This made me think; is Clovelly in fact English, as ‘leigh’ obviously is Old English, meaning a woodland enclosure? Was Coates attributing a Cornish meaning to Clovelly because its alternative ‘leigh’ spelling has been dropped from common use?

But Clovelly is a fishing village perched on rocky cliffs and seems a highly unlikely place for a ‘leigh’. So with Clovelly the Old English explanation did not make much sense.

Saying that though, had the Clovelleigh spelling prevailed over Clovelly, I am sure it would have been much more difficult for Coates to propose a plausible Cornish origin for the name, even if the village's location, and the existence of the nearby Clovelly Dykes ancient earthworks, made a Celtic language explanation more likely.

ExeValleyBoy,

I must be brief (until Friday), but Coates used the earliest form of the name Covelly to reach his conclusion. Covelleigh was a later corruption.

EVB,

I believe you can also look to local pronounciation for guidance here.

When I was at uni many years ago (at Lancaster) there was a local town named "Cleveley".

I was absolutely caned by the locals for repeatedly pronouncing it "cleh-velly" (as any Devonian would) because up there the town was pronounced "cleev-leee".

If the suffix had been "leigh", as I suspect was true for cleveley's origins, I doubt that it would have transmuted to the way it is now pronounced in Deb'n.

The same is true for many a Devon placename.

>> As I do not posses the complete series of 1:25,000 scale maps for Devon (yet), there may well be some ‘tre’ names that I have not yet discovered.<<

If you've got a spare £15 lying around, you can order a place name element finder on CD-ROM from

http://www.digital-documents.co.uk/archi/uk-gaz.htm

but it only has 16000 place names on it, which doesn't sound a lot compared to, say, the official index to the OS Maps, which is well into 6 figures. I didn't think it sounded worth buying, but someone else might.

ExeValleyBoy,

To enlarge on my previous hasty post concerning the validity of Richard Coates’s etymology for ‘Clovelly’, Coates used the earliest forms of the name to arrive at his conclusion that the name was Brythonic. He cites the early forms ‘Clofely’ (1296) and ‘Clofeli’ (1306). These early forms would appear to rule out any Old English etymologies containing the element ‘leigh’ (from the Old English ‘leah’, meaning ‘woodland’ or ‘forest’).

Nick,

Thanks for the link to the place-name element finder, but as you rightly say, it is probably not detailed enough to find the very minor names, which constitute the majority of 'tre' names in Devon.

ExeValleyBoy,

I think I may have tracked down the ‘Trehoro’ place-name, which you discovered on the old 1769 map of Devon. I was looking at an old Devon map (undated), which I had downloaded some time ago, and in the area where ‘Trehoro’ was located on the 1769 map, I found the name ‘Pahoraxwick’. The ‘-hora-‘ part of this name looked very similar to the ‘-horo’ part of ‘Trehoro’. The map showing ‘Pahoraxwick’ looks like an early 19th century map, which certainly predated the transfer of Maker Parish from Devon to Cornwall. It clearly shows the location of ‘Pahorawick’ as being just north of the road joining Stratton and Holsworthy (A3072), and just to the East of the Tamar.

The place-name ‘Pahoraxwick’ (as is the case with ‘Trehoro’) no longer exists, but at precisely the point where ‘Pahoraxwick’ is marked on the 19th century map, modern maps show a hamlet called ‘Bartonweek’ at OS Grid Reference SS 292056. It is the only place-name in the area containing the element ‘-week’ (equivalent to ‘-wick’), and it is exactly in the right spot on the map. I suspect that it is quite likely that ‘Pahoraxwick’ was a later name for ‘Trehoro’ (preserving the ‘horo’ or ‘hora’ part of the name) and that this then became ‘Bartonweek’ in the latter half of the 19th century (preserving the ‘wick’ or ‘week’ part of the name).

Plymouth Exile,

Thanks for this new information about Trehoro. Pahoraxwick, and later Bartonweek, certainly seems like a possible candidate. I could not track down Bartonweek however, but found Pancrasweek and The Barton and Barton Gate.

Is this the area, or am I looking in the wrong place?

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=229500&y=105500&z=3&sv=229500,105500&st=4&ar=N&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf

Another possible Trehoro location;

The 1769 map does not represent distance or position very accurately, so I followed the river Torridge, Trehoro appearing to lie on a third branch. Then I looked for it in relation to places that still exist, ‘Clavet’ presumably being yet another spelling of Clovelly, ‘Biddiford’ being more or less the same, and ‘Newton’ probably being Newton St Petrock. This led me to this area.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=230100&y=118375&z=3&sv=230100,118375&st=4&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf&dn=581&ax=230100&ay=118375

(Clicking the minus sign at the bottom immediately shows the location in context at 10 km scale.)

The Horton Bridge and the Horton Farm I found in this area could preserve the original ‘horo’ element. The ‘tre’ being Cornish for farm makes the Horton Farm a possible candidate.