Forgotten Woodlands

delichon•about 1 hour ago

If someday someone does this study for South Florida, they will wonder how a previously mountainous terrain became so flat. You can drive around and spot "Hills," "Heights,” “Ridge,” “Vista,” and “View” on pancake-flat sites. Hopefully there weren't ancient Scottish versions of real estate developers confounding this study.

nephihaha•24 minutes ago

In a low lying area, all these names can refer to far more smaller features than they would in hillier places. The "ridge" in question may have been only twenty foot tall for example, and smaller than a railway foundation.

Some of these may have been artificial and built by native peoples. Others might be remnants of ancient tsunami and hurricanes, changing sea levels, floods and so on.

The same phenomenon occurs elsewhere. The Netherlands have tiny features they call hills. In East Anglia, the flattest region of England, there are tiny hills. If you look at any pictures of the Gog Magog Hills south of Cambridge, you could walk up them barely breaking a sweat. In fact in some of the pictures, you'd struggle to spot the hills. In Scotland, they wouldn't even be considered a hill range.

delichon•21 minutes ago

I challenge you to visit Hollywood Hills, Florida and find any hill larger than a leaf pile.

xhkkffbf•about 1 hour ago

The joke is that the real estate developments are named for what's been removed. But I guess that's not the case for some of these Florida developments.

kgkglhlpppo•about 1 hour ago

In summer I live jn a place with a tiny dialect that like 6000 people still speak and when these reaearchers from X university come around I like making up plausible sounding words and telling them I heard my grandma say it at the hearth when I was a wee child

Im powering humanity forward

dvh•about 1 hour ago

Speaking of forgotten woodlands, I've talked about this on HN two times already, might as well say it third time. Go on Google maps and look at the size of the Sherwood forest. I've never truly recovered from that experience.

nephihaha•21 minutes ago

Sherwood is not forgotten of course. Every fan of Robin Hood knows it. But it had the misfortune to be in an early industrial area.

I mentioned Birnam Wood in another post, which features in MacBeth. Shakespeare plays fast and loose with Scottish history, but Birnam Wood was a real place. One or two of the old trees are still there, but not much. The area has been reforested a bit within the past two hundred years.

nephihaha•39 minutes ago

"Gaelic has been spoken at one time or another in the whole of Scotland, barring the north of Caithness..."

It was spoken in the north of Caithness into the 20th century in Dounreay parish, and previously some other areas just to the west of Thurso. (There is evidence of past Gaelic usage in Dunnet parish, and if "the Caithness Book" is to be believed, even in Stroma, the most northerly part of Caithness.)

nephihaha•37 minutes ago

One of the ongoing debates in Scottish and Irish onomastics is about the Kil- prefix. It is usually connected with Cill meaning a monastic cell, but may be a corruption of Coille (wood) and Gil (a gill or ghyll). Kilduff in Fife may be Coille Dubh (black/dark wood). There are also names in Scotland referring to oaks, sacred groves and so on.

Names like Cults outside Aberdeen may refer to forests. Calton Hill in Edinburgh appears to refer to hazel trees. Beith/Beath in placenames may refer to birch trees.

This is without going into the Brythonic names, of which there are many.

Forgotten Woodlands

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