This last couple of years has seen me doing some exploring and more detailed archaeology in Redesdale. It is beautiful, wild Northumberland countryside with a wealth of wildlife, history and tradition. I have had the honour to work alongside local people and other like-minded folk from Tynedale Archaeology Group as a volunteer on the National Lottery funded Revitalising Redesdale project.
Redesdale from moorland west of Rattenraw. A Curtis (2018).
Another computer-based project is now drawing to a conclusion, that of transcribing the Northumberland Ordnance Survey Name Books of the 1860's first survey, a project led by Professor Diana Whalley. The last parish to be transcribed was Elsdon (including Rochester, Otterburn and a few parts of other parishes, before boundary changes) with about 800 interesting and often informative place-names. Involvement with this project has led me to this post.
Given as an authority to the spelling of one of the place-names in the parish was a reference to 'The Lay of the Reedwater Minstrel'. It is a poem by Robert Roxby, and reading it makes you aware that not only was he too facinated by the place-names of the area but also appeared to know them intimately as places, along with a few of the local inhabitants.
“He’ll sing Reedwater’s muirlands wild,
Where whirring heath-cocks flee,
Where limpid wells and heather bells
Delight the sportsman’s e’e.”
This quotation is used on page 13 of the Revitalising Redesdale: Landscape Conservation Action Plan (LCAP-Part 1) published in July 2017.
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