Place-names
The main giveaways are:
- Welsh, as in Welsh Lane or Welsh Way
- Drove or Drovers, as in The Drovers Arms. (But watch out for the numerous 'droves' in Somerset and East Anglia, which are drainage ditches into the River Parrett or The Wash. Ask the question "Does this 'drove' lead to a market?")
- The Black Ox, after the beast and/or the famous bank.
- Drift, an old word for ‘drove' – the Banbury Lane is also called The Driftway.
- Any name with the prefix ‘Ox-', e.g. Oxford, Oxbridge, Oxpen.
- Halfpenny Green, Field, Patch, Meadow etc. One halfpenny a beast was the usual charge for accommodation overnight
- Bullock Lane, Bullock Way. Most of the trade was in bullocks
- More unlikely names with connections to beasts, e.g. ship (often a corruption of 'sheep') and cat (from 'cattle'). Strangest is rother-, which meant a horned beast, usually cattle. (Unfortunately there are some rother-s with different derivations, so not completely reliable.)
- Stocks or Stockings, the names of farms where stock could be fed and watered.
- London or Smithfield, the ultimate destinations – there's a ‘Smithfield Road' in Builth Wells, 200 miles from London.
- Little London: there are nearly 100 around the country, and even more are being found, mostly on the edge of villages. (It is the second commonest place-name of all, the commonest being Coldharbour - see below.) Could these fields, or dwellings with fields attached, have been named by their owners to tempt Welshman to put their cattle/sheep there overnight? No, it must have been the Welsh who called the LLs "llundainfach", little steps to London as it were. (See the article "Little London, Alveley" under the Salop tab, which convinced me.) My friend John Trimmer used to keep a Llundainfach website, giving details of all the LLs he had found, and has given me permission to duplicate his findings on this website. It now has a separate tab of its own at the top.
- Runt, an epithet for the Welsh Blacks, which were half the size of some English breeds.
- Coldharbour an unmanned shelter where any traveller or drover could hide from wild weather. I put question marks around the word at one stage because of disputes among scholars about the derivation of this word. The commonest 'alternative' theory is that Coldharbour farms had poor soil, but none of these scholars seem to have gone to the farms in question and asked or tested it... As for the derivation from the French col d'arbres, well that is just crazy. So I'm sticking to my original. Anyway, Ann Cole is of the same opinion, and Ann I shall always follow.
- Lane or Way, the most common indicators of all.
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Drift Lane, Wroxton, Banbury
Drovers Arms, Epynt, Wales
Upper Boddington
Halfpenny Field, Painscastle
Little London, Alveley, Salop