What's In A Name?
| NORTH YORKSHIRE |  | | | CLEVELAND | | | | COUNTY DURHAM | |
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The ‘Oak Clearing’ is anything but now
ACKLAM, today a suburb of
Middlesbrough, as little as a
century ago an independent village,
has a name that takes us
back to the forests of ancient
England.
Acklam itself is made up of two
antique words: the first ac, an
earlier spelling of oak, and the
second leah meaning clearing'.
We have then the Oak Clearing'
in what was, in the 11th century,
when the name was first recorded,
some of the most heavilywooded
landscapes in Britain: a
contrast with the tarmac and
concrete Acklam of today.
But just what would an oak
clearing have meant to our ancestors
stranded in the frightening
forests of the Dark Age
north? Well, the oak has always
attracted attention because its
sheer size has meant that it is
regularly struck by lightning.
It consequently had, already in
the times of the druids, a reputation
as a sacred tree - a vivid
scene in classical literature describes
a member of that sect
collecting mistletoe from an oak.
And this reputation for holiness
survived into medieval times
when it was often at the Gospel
Oak' that the Bible was read before
a village set out to beat the
bounds. But oaks were also an
important economic resource:
acorns was used for pigs, oak
bark for dye and medicine, oak
wood for lumber, oak leaves for
wine, even oak galls for ink.
The earliest citizens of Acklam
would certainly then have had
much to be grateful for to the
oaks that surrounded them. And
it is possible that some of the
distant descendents of those
original trees have survived in
the woodland to the south of
modern Acklam.
● Simon Young is a historian
and author of AD500.
12:46pm Friday 21st March 2008
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