article_snippet: A ciste: Gaelic for burial chamber.
article_snippet: Because the original meanings of place names are largely forgotten and ancient local names for hills, streams and bogs have fallen out of use, Robert Macfarlane performs a miracle of resurrection in Robert Macfarlane new book.
article_snippet: Reviving a fascinating archive of old terms from Anglo-Saxon to Old Norse, Robert Macfarlane dances through the closed door of the past — a labour of love as well as learning.
article_snippet: Original meanings of place names are largely forgotten and ancient local names for hills, streams and bogs have fallen out of use .
article_snippet: All of these were named by All of these ancestors with particular, peculiar and poetic terms which probably fell out of common use in the last 100 years.
article_snippet: And then comes a ‘glossary’, lists of names for things specific to one aspect of landscape.
article_snippet: These lists are fascinating.
article_snippet: For example, eit: a tiny word from the Isle of Lewis with a huge meaning:
article_snippet: The practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so they would sparkle in the moonlight and thereby attract salmon to they in the late summer and autumn.
article_snippet: People in Essex used to call you ‘watery-headed’ if you were anxious about rain.
article_snippet: And how about the glorious list of words for icicle: aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell and conkerbell (Dorset), daggler and dagglet (Hampshire), ickle (Yorkshire) and shuckle (Cumbria).
article_snippet: Like many of us, This was deeply shocked when the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary left out words no longer seen as ‘relevant’ to modern childhood, including acorn, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, dandelion, fern, heather, heron, ivy, lark, mistletoe, newt, otter, pasture and willow.
highlights_snippet: Original meanings of place names have been largely forgotten .
  