What's in a name? The meaning of 37 Derbyshire place names - from bees and deer to stones and streams

Most Derbyshire towns can boast a history which stretches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years – leaving legacies on the landscape, built environment and local economies, and in the enduring names given to those places. If you have ever wondered where your community’s name comes from then read on!

When it comes to British place names, Anglo-Saxon origins tend to dominate in the south and Scandinavian languages in the North, mixed in with Old British or Celtic terms for natural features such as hills and rivers. Derbyshire still shows the influence of all three factors in the names we find today.

Often towns and villages share common endings such as -tun (settlement), -ham (homestead), -feld (farmland), -by (village), -caester (Roman stronghold), -worthig (enclosure), -dun (hill), -halh (nook of land) – but these usually follow a first element which is much harder to define, especially when a personal name is concerned.

The famous Domesday Book – a land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror and completed in 1086 – shows Derbyshire names which have been modernised but otherwise changed very little in all that time.

To understand where they came from, we went looking in the Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names.