WEDNESDAY 13 FEBRUARY

Will the truckshunter who sent me this lovely picture of a Highland cow please get in touch? I’m afraid I’ve accidentally ditched your email (having carefully preserved the picture, of course), so I’m unable to give you the credit you deserve.

PLACE-NAMES....AGAIN
A truckshunter called Vince, who lives in Dorset and whose ONLY contact with the programme is via this blog (for reasons I don’t quite understand), has emailed to ask me what Pity Me means. His great-grandfather was born there and, he says, he’s wondered about the name since he was a bairn - as well he might. Well now....

Local folklore insists that Pity Me is derived from French petit mere - ‘small lake’. That’s the story I was told when I was young and you’ve probably heard it too. However, like so many of the ‘folk-explanations’ attached to our more unusual, not to say exotic, place-names (such as Glororum, Quakinghouses and Jesmond), it is almost certainly a load of dingo’s kidneys. There are several local place-names dating from the Norman French conquest of these parts but a quick survey of them will show you that the Norman style was to give any place they settled (as opposed to a place that was there before they arrived and thus already had a name) a very grand-sounding name. Indeed, beau or belle, ‘beautiful, grand’, occur in many of them. Beamish is ‘beautiful house’, Bellasis and Bewley are ‘beautiful place’, Bearpark is ‘beautiful retreat’ and similar grandiose intentions lie behind Bellister, Beaufront, Belmont and Butterby. Sometimes, the name of the conquering knight is commemorated: d’Araynis at Darras (Hall), Guines at Guyzance or de Plessis at Plashetts.

Very occasionally, the Normans did allow themselves to become more workaday when naming new places: the occupations of ‘forester’, ‘sacrist’ and ‘fencemaker’ gave rise to Frosterley, Sacriston and Scremerston.

But nowhere else in England - let alone the north-east - did the Normans bequeath a name as humble or as drab as ‘little lake’. That’s just not what they did.

None of this means that the ‘little lake’ theory can be discounted out-of-hand. It does, however, mean that we will certainly never know for sure what gave rise to Pity Me. Indeed, another suggestion - that it is Anglo-Saxon ‘pitty mea’ (a pitted meadow or field full of bumps and dips) - is at least as likely to be true as the folkloric one.

Curiously, it was only after I started work at the BBC nine years ago that I discovered, courtesy of a Saturday morning listener, that there are at least two other local places called Pity Me. One is an old sub-parish name on north Tyneside and the other is, I think, a farm near Chollerford.

THE STATUE
Many thanks for your continuing support for the removal of THAT statue from Durham City’s Market Place. I’ll be contacting the Council about it when I get back from leave. In the meantime, you may care to consider doing the same thing yourself.....

BOB’S YER UNCLE, FANNY’S YER AUNT
The seventh question in this set of nine is......What was the name of the town the Connors lived in in the US sitcom Roseanne?

CONTACT ME
Post comments on this blog or contact me in any one (or more) of these ways....
ian.robinson@bbc.co.uk
ianstuartrobinson@googlemail.com
text 07786 200954 (while the programme is on-air)
call (between about 0545 and 0630 Monday to Friday) 0191 232 6565
Ian Robinson, The Nightshift, BBC Radio Newcastle, Spital Tongues, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE99 1RN

NOTE
Please bear in mind that the views expressed in this blog are my own and NOT the views of the BBC.