Story · Curiosities map · about 3 min
Where the Vikings named their villages
Many British place names still carry the language of the people who named them. This story sorts 13,700 towns, villages and hamlets by a recognisable name element. It is a rule of thumb: nobody has checked each name’s history by hand.
A map of name endings
Each dot is a town, village or hamlet, coloured by the language its name element comes from: blue for Old English (-ton, -ham, -ley), orange for Old Norse (-by, -thorpe), green for Welsh and Cornish, purple for Gaelic. Only names that match a recognised element are shown.
Lincolnshire: Viking country
In Lincolnshire, 47% of the places whose names we can classify end in Old Norse elements like -by and -thorpe. That is the heartland of the old Danelaw, the part of England ruled under Viking law from the 9th century. The names have outlasted the kingdom by over a thousand years. Across Great Britain there are 961 such places.
Cornwall: a different language
In Cornwall, Old Norse endings are all but absent (0% of classified places), while 55% start with Cornish elements such as Tre- (a farm) and Pol- (a pool). Names outlast the people who gave them.
Cumbria: Vikings from the west
In Cumbria 43% of the places we can classify have Old Norse names, a long way behind Lincolnshire's 47%, but far above anywhere in the south. Many of these settlers are thought to have arrived from the west, across the Irish Sea, rather than down the east coast.
Kent: the edge of the Danelaw
In Kent 98% of classifiable names are Old English and only 1% Old Norse. The Danelaw never reached the south-east, and the map shows its edge as plainly as any border drawn on paper.
The Highlands: Gaelic
In the Highland, Argyll and Bute and Western Isles council areas, 76% of classifiable names are Gaelic, the language that came to Scotland from Ireland. Layers of language, one map: each place name is a small fossil of who lived there.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- What can place names tell us about people who lived somewhere long ago?
- Why is sorting names by their ending only a rule of thumb?
Try it on the map: Search for the place you live. What does its name probably come from, and does the map agree?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.