Keeping the wolf from the door in Ushaw Moor (From The Northern Echo)

Keeping the wolf from the door in Ushaw Moor

PLACENAMES do have this extraordinarily irritating habit of not quite being what they seem.

Take Ushaw Moor in County Durham, just outside Durham itself. That initial U is, in fact, of all things, a shortened version of the Anglo-Saxon wulf ,or ‘wolf’ as we would say. And shaw, another Dark Age word, gives us the Wood of the Wolf – a wolf lair once carefully avoided by locals.

Not that we should be surprised at this confusion.

Across 30 generations Wulfsceaga (as it originally was) was easily bent out of shape by careless and sometimes foreign mouths, the missing ‘W’, for example, was the fault of the Vikings.

And placenames referring to wolves are relatively common in Britain – they occur almost 40 times in England, mainly with reference to fields or forested areas. But how late did this particular lair survive?

Well, our last records of wolves in England come from the 14th century – though in the environs of mighty Durham, it is likely that the last wolf head had been stuck on a village gate in the 13th century. By that date, several other British dodos had also bit the dust including boars, bears and beavers, wolves being only the last to be wiped out by man.

Today, wolves are the playthings of TV wildlife programmes.

But back in Ushaw, circa 700, when the name was given, they were a peril to livestock and life.

Indeed, one can almost smell the fear as a group of armed men approach the copse at twilight and watch the snarling beasts defending their glades.

No quarter would have been asked and none given.

via Keeping the wolf from the door in Ushaw Moor (From The Northern Echo).