Lost lanes of Linton (Derbys) Pt6
In the second part of the Via Devana blog series, I considered some possible options for the Roman route's continuation beyond the junction with Ryknild Street and its use as a salt road. One route to the northwest might have passed through the Cheshire salt producing region. Women extracting salt from brinewater springs in Nantwich were referred to as 'Wallers' in the town's medieval records.[1] An inference could be made that the Linton Wallway might have been a strand of one of the west/east salt routes like the Walton Way, which ran just to the south of Linton, or that it ran through an area which was wet, where groundwater welled up.
Another perhaps more reasonable explanation came to light while studying preparatory Ordnance Survey drawings of west Cambridgeshire.[2] To the east of Great Gransden is an area of rough pasture labeled 'Walland Common'. The English Place Name Society (EPNS)[3] gives 'land occupied by Britons or serfs' for Walland (Devon) and 'land of the herdsman/men or peasant(s)' for Swalland (Dorset). There are also occurences of Wallands Field names, one of which curiously is at Walton-on-Trent, c.4.5 miles from Linton.
A further search of the EPNS website returned an occurence of a Wallway field at Dunham-on-Hill to the northeast of Chester, while Walland Marsh, part of the greater Romney Marsh, may be found near Lydd in Kent. On a 1799 O.S. drawing (Dungeness OSD 104-2), it is recorded as Walling Marsh. Land reclamation of the marshes involved the building of a wall or bank, which English Heritage suggest must predate C13th and probably occured between C9th and the Norman Conquest.[4]
The 'ing' ending for this form of the name could suggest an early origin. However 'ing' is a term for a field or enclosure, for which the EPNS has a handful of references to in the north of England in C18th/C19th. There is also 'Dingle', which has a more widespread distribution, but the references for these are all C19th.
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Extract of Hyett's 1808 'Caxton' drawing: OSD234-2. (British Library image. Open Government Licence: OGL V3.0) |
An OS guide to place names has 'field/level ground/meadow' for Wall/Well from Old Norse 'völle'.[5] Might we then see a Scandinavian influence in the Wallway name? Although Derbyshire as a whole lay within the Danelaw, the far south of the county may have been in the borderlands. Linton is situated c.15 miles south of Derby and a Viking army had reached Repton, only c.7 miles away. Furthermore, there are a group of '-by' settlements within c.4-6 miles of Linton, and several occurences of the '-thorpe' (an outlying farm) placename element. Appleby, Ashby, Blackfordby, Bretby, Kilwardby, Smisby, Boothorpe, Donisthorpe and Oakthorpe all lie to the north/northeast of Linton and intriguingly, also the Burton-on-Trent to Nuneaton road (now A444), which could perhaps have marked the former boundary between the Danelaw and Mercia. Could the terminology for landscape features brought by new neighbours from across the North Sea have spread into adjacent Mercian areas and have been embraced? Might those borderland South Derbyshire settlements have received Scandinavian incomers? Surely in Bretby (usually interpreted as 'the farm of the Britons'), we see a melding of two cultures.
The name Linton Heath today is synonymous with the rows of former miners' houses which run from the southeastern end of Main St to the A444, but originally the name may well have applied to a larger area of land to the east of the core of the old village. (I read this somewhere, but forget the source!).
I am being drawn to the conclusion that the term 'Wall' refers to an area of coarse, common grazing land, in some areas of a boggy nature such as at Walling Marsh in Kent, or Wallway Farm near Meare in Somerset, where part of the Sweet Track was discovered. It may also have been liminal land: Linton Heath for instance originally formed part of the boundary between Derbyshire and Leicestershire. Following the Local Government Act of 1894[6], the former neighbouring Leicestershire parishes of Overseal and Netherseal were given to Derbyshire in the land swaps of 1897, thus the county boundary moved further east. The Linton Wallway (Main St), may then have been the name of the track leading to, or through the common grazing land.
Although the earliest dates for some of the Walland/Walling references appear to run from c.1800, Linton Heath may well have been common grazing land for centuries, connecting a turbulent period of English history right up to the C20th.
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