The following is the contribution on "Coldharbour" by Trevor Ogden,
forwarded to me by Stephanie Jenks. The reason that it was not sent to the
list is that Stephanie is able to receive messages from the list but is
unable to send them, for reasons unknown. The contribution was to the
Oxfordshire local history group and was written in 1999. It seems that
discussions of Coldharbour have occurred intermittently over the years!
Ernie Pollard
> Sorry to come in late on this topic, but I've been on holiday.
> I became very interested in the placename Coldharbour when I was a student
> in the 1960s, because of its rather mysterious alleged link with Roman
> roads. I listed a couple of hundred occurrences, almost all insignificant
> places like farms and field names. Very few of these were big enough to be
> listed in any gazetteer - I'd be interested to know if there is now a
> placename list comprehensive enough to cover them. Speaking from memory,
> most occur south and east of a line from Bristol to the Humber, but not in
E
> Anglia, with a sprinkling in the north and west. As others have said,
> Caldecot (plus variants) is supposed to mean the same, and is even
commoner
> and more widespread.
>
> From memory, there is one example of Coldharbour from 13th cent, but
> altogether very few examples from before 1600. There is no evidence
> whatsoever from old forms to support anything other than an English
origin -
> the supposed Celtic and Latin origins are speculations based on the
alleged
> link with Roman roads, old trackways, etc. As far as I could discover, the
> Wiltshire antiquary Sir Richard Colt Hoare was the first to suggest a
Roman
> road connection, at the beginning of the 19th century. This seems to have
> fired the imagination of his successors, and I think that most 19th cent
> volumes of the periodical 'Notes and Queries' have correspondents listing
> their local occurrences, and their relation with Roman antiquities. There
> was support for the connection in pre-war volumes of the English
Place-Names
> Society, and after WW II Ivan Margary supported the connection in his
> definitive 'Roman Roads in Britain'. I wrote to him about it, and he told
> me that he had written a paper in the 1930s in which he had compared the
> distribution of Coldharbours in the Weald with random points on the map,
and
> found that Coldharbours were biased towards Roman roads. He couldn't get
> the paper published.
>
> I took a map of a large part of the south of England, and measured the
> distances of my Coldharbours from the nearest Roman roads, and compared
this
> with the fraction of the land area within different distances. If there
> were no bias, the fraction of Coldharbours within two miles (say) of a
road
> should be the same as the fraction of the land area. I found a fairly
> strong relative bias of Coldharbours towards Roman roads, which at the
time
> I was convinced was real. In this field though not others I have become
> more sceptical, and now doubt this conclusion. One possible confounder is
> that post-medieval settlement is biased towards the routes taken by Roman
> roads, at least in the south, so that any placename might show this bias.
A
> valid control group would not be based on land area, but a random sample
of
> all other places with names first recorded between 1600 and 1850, say,
> including those of fields, farms, etc. Deriving this sample would be a
> non-trivial problem! I wrote up what I had done and published it with the
> list in a minor periodical - contact me if interested and I will dig out
the
> reference. About ten years ago there was a much more scholarly article in
> the journal 'Nomina', which gave a good discussion of the origin of the
name
> and concluded that the road connection was unreal. I do not have the
> reference to this, but this correspondence has stimulated me to get it, so
> again contact me off-list if interested.
>
> My own feeling now is that because Coldharbours are almost all very minor
> places, very few of us know more than one or two occurrences from personal
> experience. If you start tracing a Roman road, especially in the south,
you
> will be looking in great detail at a narrow band of country, and will
notice
> that Coldharbour is a name that you come across surprisingly often, and
you
> are unaware of occurrences elsewhere. Even if you have never heard of the
> alleged connection, this sows the seed in your mind that this strange
> placename does seem to occur near to Roman roads (or even ley lines if
> that's what you're tracing). This surely cannot be a coincidence, you
> think. But perhaps it can!
>
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