What's In A Name?
| NORTH YORKSHIRE |  | | | CLEVELAND | | | COUNTY DURHAM | | |
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The Nidd – or, ‘the flowing one’
THE Nidd, one of the north's more
picturesque rivers, runs close to
Harrogate before joining the Ouse
just outside York. But what does
that simple syllable mean?
Well, as is always the case with
river names, it is necessary, if you
want to get at the meaning, to first
answer another question: what
language does the word Nidd
come from?
Now in Britain there are rivers
named in Norman French
(though very few), in Norse - the
language of the Vikings, in Anglo-
Saxon and also in Celtic.
And, in fact, Nidd comes from
that last and earliest stratum of
recorded British languages. It is
Celtic and this means that it may
be two or three thousand years
old; to get the full sense of this
you must remember that most
town or village names are a pathetic
thousand or thirteen hundred
years old - the Nidd then virtually
has stalactites hanging off
it.
The river's meaning is, however, a
little less dramatic: Nidd meant
simply the flowing one'.
Now in case this is a disappointment,
it should be remembered
that river names in Britain are
generally tedious: we have waterways
called the fast one' (the
Tame), the watery one' (the Goyt)
and the valleyed one' (the Colne).
And a series of rivers across Western
Europe have the same root as
the Nidd, even if twisted out of
shape by the centuries, for modern
pronunciation and spelling
are all different.
The Nidd's cousins include, and
this list is far from exhaustive, the
Neath in Glamorgan, the Nethe in
Belgium, another Nethe in Germany
where there is also a Nidde
and a Niede.
* Simon Young is a historian and
author of AD500.
1:04pm Friday 2nd May 2008
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