Orchards in place names

In English place names, the Old English words for apple tree and pear tree are the recurring elements, and they underlie a range of settlement names in which the modern spelling has drifted considerably from the original. Names built on the pear tree element are particularly widespread and often no longer look like anything to do with fruit. Orchard itself, and its earlier forms, appears in both settlement and field names.

Welsh place names use the words for orchard and for apple in comparable positions. French names built on the words for apple and orchard occur widely in the cider districts of Normandy and Brittany. Asturian and Galician names built on the local words for apple and for the press house are common in the cider country. In the Basque Country the element meaning apple appears in a large number of surnames and farmstead names, frequently combined with a suffix indicating a stand or grove of something.

The reliable inference from any of these is narrow: at the time the name became fixed, fruit trees were a distinguishing feature of that place. That is worth having. It is not the same as a record of an orchard.

Settlement names in England were largely fixed by the medieval period and then transmitted with little regard for whether the feature they described still existed. A village named for its pear tree kept the name for eight hundred years after the tree died. This makes them poor evidence of anything recent.

Field names behave differently. They were coined locally, used administratively, revised as land use changed, and recorded in detail in tithe and estate documents. A field called Orchard Ground, Great Orchard or Pear Tree Close in a nineteenth-century tithe apportionment is fairly direct evidence that there was an orchard there, and comparison with the map on the same document will usually show whether trees were still standing.

This is a working method rather than an antiquarian exercise. Orchard restoration and community orchard projects routinely use tithe maps, estate surveys and field names to establish where a parish’s orchards stood, and they frequently find survivors — a line of old trees in a hedge, a single standard in a paddock — exactly where the documents say to look.

A fruit-derived place name does not establish cider making. Apples and pears were grown for eating, storing, cooking and feeding to stock as well as for pressing, and perry pears in particular were also valued as timber and as boundary markers. Reading a pear-tree name as evidence of a perry tradition is a leap the name does not support on its own.

Nor do these names establish antiquity of the current landscape. A district full of orchard field names may have lost every tree by 1900; a district with none may have been planted heavily in the nineteenth century when its names were already ancient. The name records one moment, and the moment is usually not the one being asked about.

The honest use of the material is corroborative. Place and field names, tithe records, old maps and surviving trees together make a strong case; any one of them alone makes a suggestion.