BURNESTON, in Hambleton, has, as the modern reader might be able to intuit, a hot name.

Dating back to the time of the Norman invasion – when it first appears in writing in the Domesday Book – and perhaps three or four centuries before, the village recalls an ancient agricultural technique involving flame.

Working backwards, ton can be found in hundreds of English placenames from Brighton to Darlington. It means “settlement” and is, ultimately, the ancestor of our modern English word “town”. There was a clump of houses here.

Burn, on the other, hand means something like ‘fired’ giving us the ‘fired settlement’.

Now this might sound like a reference to a disaster in the ton at an early date, but it is more probable that what we have here is one of a class of placenames that recall the burning of brush and woods to create fields and space for houses.

Nor was this rare as a way of clearing out wild areas or rejuvenating the soils. We are dealing with a Dark Age version of the modern burning of moorlands.

Other examples of similar burnings among our nationalplacenames include Brent (or Burnt) Eleigh, in Suffolk, and Bradfield Combust (as in Combustion) in the same county. And if we want to think of Burneston in the 7th or 8th century, when this settlement very likely came into existence, we should think of newly-built houses with the ash of several destroyed acres of wild England blowing around in the breeze.