By: Blonde One
Studying the maps of the area before a trip is one of the exciting things about walking in a new place. Here’s just some of the unfamiliar language that I needed to learn for my trip up to the beautiful Lake District:
Tarn – a mountain lake
Beck – a stream
Fell – mountain or hill
Force – waterfall
…Thwaite – a meadow or cleared land. Lots of place names have this as a suffix.
Crag – a steep or rugged cliff face
Pike – a pointed or conical hill
Part of the charm of my visit was learning the definitions of the lovely Northern dialect.
Think “Dike” is a fun one – in Cumbria a dike is a hedge with a bank. In Scotland a dyke, or dike, is a stone wall and in most of England a dyke is a ditch.
I don’t think a dyke has to be stone, but maybe if you’re the kind of person who builds with brick you’re more likely to call it a wall.
There are earthen walls called dykes elsewhere – the Deil’s Dyke in the borders, or Offa’s Dyke – and the Scots Dyke in Cumbria itself, so probably in Cumbria too it originally meant the built up bank rather than the hedge.