WHAT devilish liars place-names can be.

Take, for example, Cowpen Bewley, a village on the edge of Stockton. The reader will not be surprised to learn that, as with most placenames in the north, this dates back to the seventh or eighth century.

They will also and quite reasonably assume that cows and fences were involved. This was surely where the cattle of Stockton were corralled before being slaughtered or milked?

Well, whether there were or were not cows there is a question we cannot answer. What we can be sure of is that the name has nothing to do with any four-legged creature.

Cowpen or Cupum as it was known should be translated as ‘the Traps’ at Bewley (a later addition meaning ‘the beautiful place’). And what kind of traps were these? Rabbit traps, greyhound traps or horsedrawn traps. Well, none of the above. A clue?

This word always appears in settlements next to large rivers, for we are dealing here with fish traps. But we must be careful with that simple word ‘trap’. It is tempting to imagine a few little dainty lobster nets thrown into the water by our ancestors. Dark Age fish traps tended to be more ambitious.

We are talking, in fact, about minor engineering works.

Often covering tens of feet, sometimes more than 200, they were essentially giant funnels that narrowed to a point where some bait was left – typically sheep offal or flesh covered sheep bones – and where the fish could be plucked out by grateful riverside dwellers. One coastal trap in Dyfed was so large that its remains were spotted last year by a surfer on Google Earth no less.