By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal
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were paid with the solidus.
The inscription is very faint in places – perhaps through wear and tear, or perhaps it was badly stamped when the coin was made. It is possible to make out a sequence of l, t, o, e, and d, and there may be an i at the beginning and an h or g at the end. Nobody has any idea what this might mean.
‘I know Caistor,’ I said to the man from the hotel. I should have said ‘know of’, I suppose, for I have never been there; but it’s a curious fact that when you study the linguistic history of a place, you quickly develop a sense of intimacy about it. I do feel I ‘know’ Caistor. It’s much more than ‘know of’.
I was spared an interrogation, however, because a loud bell sounded, and the man dashed away to deal with it. Maybe it was a fire alarm. People at the Portmeirion hotel would be especially sensitive to that. The present hotel isn’t the one that was originally developed by Clough Williams-Ellis. That burned down during the night of 5 June 1981. It didn’t reopen until 1988.
‘Fire’ was the symbolic meaning of one of the runes: <, called cen (pronounced ‘cane’). An Old English poem has been preserved, in which each symbol in the runic alphabet is given a poetic gloss. This is what the poet has to say about cen. (The p and ð letters are pronounced as modern ‘th’.)
Cen byp cwicera gehwam, cup on fyre
blac ond beorhtlic, byrnep oftust
ðærhi æpelingas inne restap.
‘The torch is known to everyone alive by its pale, bright flame; it always burns where princes sit within.’
Time was passing, and I had to move on. I had to be in Hay-on-Wye that evening. The sands in the estuary were rapidly disappearing. The family that had been walking there had reached the harbour wall, and were talking furiously amongst themselves. I didn’t recognize the language. Maybe it was Basque.
As I walked up the hill towards the car park a man passed me wearing a huge Prisoner badge with a penny-farthing bicycle and a number 6 on it. That was another mysterious thing about the Village. A penny-farthing bike would appear here and there for no apparent reason.
There is something especially dehumanizing when people are given numbers instead of names. It doesn’t take a television programme to tell us that. We have seen it in the form of the labels and tattoos which identify incarcerated victims everywhere.
I suppose the practice of giving names to houses arose from a desire to avoid the impersonal effect of house numbering. That’s understandable. It’s the naming of streets by numbers that has always puzzled me. First Street, Second Street, Tenth Street, Thirty-Eighth Street… Why would anyone choose such an unimaginative and mechanical method of locating where they live?
It seems to be an American practice. Europeans don’t go in for it. On the contrary. Mainland European cities tend to personalize street locations as much as possible. Place Victor Hugo in Paris. Schillerstrasse in Berlin. Queen Caroline Street in London. Albert Cuyp Market in Amsterdam. The comparative literature critic George Steiner thinks that this is one of the major features of a European –as opposed to a New World –mindset. Europeans, he asserts, ‘inhabit echo-chambers of historical, intellectual, artistic, and scientific achievements’ as they walk through the streets of the cities of Europe.
Mind you, the Americans make up for it by being highly personal when they name towns and cities. There are twenty-three states in the USA which have a city called Washington.
The American practice of multiplying place-names can get confusing, though. There is a Wyoming city in Ohio and an Ohio city in Illinois. There are Californias in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. A city called Iowa is in Louisiana; the city of Louisiana is in Missouri; and Missouri City is in Texas.
By contrast, the British tend to shy away from naming towns and cities after people. There is no city in England called Shakespeare or Chaucer or George or Elizabeth. And there is certainly no tendency in the UK to follow the Russian fashion, where a whole town might be renamed following someone’s special achievement. After the death of the world’s first astronaut Yuri Gagarin in 1968, the town of Gzhatsk near his birthplace was renamed Gagarin in his honour.
Things were different in Anglo-Saxon times. Then a common way of naming a place was to name it after the tribal chief who lived there. Thus, we have Reading – ‘the people of Raed’or ‘Raeda’–and Dagenham – ‘Dacca’s homestead’. The Danes did the same: Grimsby is the village where Grimr lived.
The Welsh go in for person-names too. Llanfair – ‘Mary’s Church’. Porthmadog – ‘Madog’s Harbour’. Caergybi – ‘Cybi’s Fort’.
Portmeirion? Port + Meirion, from Meirionydd –Merioneth in English –the old name of the county in which the village is located. It can be traced back to the name of a fifth-century Welsh prince.
It’s always a risky business trying to make a generalization about names. There are always exceptions. For instance, for years I’d laboured under the illusion that if a person’s name had an initial in the middle, the letter must stand for a specific name. Then I encountered President Harry S. Truman.
I spent a week once trying to discover what the ‘S’ stood for. Finally, in his daughter’s autobiography, I found out. It appears that Truman’s parents had difficulty deciding which of his two grandfathers to name him after. One was called Solomon and the other was called Shippe. The identical initial presented a solution. Harry was called Harry S, and it was left up to the two sides of the family to interpret the initial as they wished.
I looked back across the village before getting in my car. Times have changed since they filmed The Prisoner. The green-painted wooden dome which acted as Number 2’s residence was replaced in the early nineties by a new copper dome. But all shall be well. It will eventually turn verdigris green once again.
WELSHPOOL
The A487 away from Portmeirion runs alongside the Ffestiniog steam railway for a while, then winds its way through the edges of Snowdonia National Park. It was a clear day, and every now and then I could see the dramatic peaks of the Snowdon range. All highly photogenic, as film companies have repeatedly seen.
Take a left at Penrhyndeudraeth and you soon pass through Carreg Llanfrothen. There you will find Plas Brondanw, the family home of Clough Williams-Ellis. The ‘Dr Who’ series The Five Doctors was shot at the Folly Castle in the grounds. So was some of Brideshead Revisited. And, if you could time-travel back to 1958, you would encounter hundreds of Liverpudlian Chinese children marching with Ingrid Bergman across stand-in Chinese mountains for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.
The roads through Snowdonia resound with the echoes of famous films. Carry On Up the Khyber was shot along the Watkin Path, one of the routes up Snowdon. Tomb Raider 2 used the environs of Llyn Gwynant. James Bond was in the area (for From Russia with Love), as were Robin Hood and Merlin.
That’s North Wales for you. One enormous film set. You can measure out any journey in film locations.
Robin Hood is a bit of a surprise, but you would expect Merlin to be here, in view of his home-grown origins – Merlin is an adaptation of Myrddin, according to the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kingdom of Britain’). Myrddin in turn comes from Caerfyrddin, the Welsh name of the county of Carmarthen, where he is supposed to have