Digging down to find out place names past

Digging down to find out place names past

10:20pm Tuesday 8th April 2014 in News By Matt Oliver, Reporter covering South Oxford and Kennington. Call me on 01865 425498

IF YOU have ever wondered what the stories behind the name of your street were, you are not alone.

The reasons can often stretch back in history as far as the Anglo-Saxon or even the Roman times.

Now one amateur archaeologist, Katie Hambrook, has uncovered some of the history behind place names in Rose Hill and Iffley.

Ms Hambrook, 54, is a librarian at Oxford Brookes University and has spent more than a year gathering and studying the information with others from archaeology group Archeox.

The findings have now been published online at Archeox.net.

She said: We wanted to get a sense of how people looked at the landscape in the past.

We hope it will complement other studies being done in Archeox.

I focused especially on the old parishes of Iffley and Rose Hill. What was interesting about that was how the area used to be woodland but over time the trees were cleared and it became ordinary fields.

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Digging down to find out place names past