Curlew - OE huilpe/huilpe

Sadly there are no old place-names, although if the many examples of curlews being associated with place in the folklore, art and literature of more modern centuries is anything to go by, the curlew was probably a noticeable and emblematic bird of wetlands and pastures in the Middle Ages too. The song of the curlew is one of the most evocative and place-defining of any bird’s; as the singer and songwriter David Gray has said—‘it wraps itself around place and memories of place’, surely because it is so haunting and mesmerising.

What we do have is the Old English name for the curlew, huilpe, because it turns up in a poem known as The Seafarer in a manuscript known as The Exeter Book, written down in the tenth century. The name, cognate with other Germanic names for the curlew and waders more generally (which may have been the case with huilpe too), is what’s known as a hapax logomenon (a single surviving example), so thank God for the Exeter Book! Here is the whole passage in translation. The speaker of the poem, the seafarer himself, travels alone on the ocean along a coast, miserable and homesick.

Sometimes the swan’s song I took for my game, the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry for men’s laughter, the gull’s singing for mead-drink. There, storms beat stone cliffs, there the tern answered them icy-feathered; very often the eagle yelled, dewy-feathered.

Modern descendants of whatever proto-Germanic word produced huilpe can be found in place-names on the continent. There is Wulpenbek in the Netherlands, meaning either ‘the wedge of land where curlews/waders are’, or ‘the curlew-beak-shaped projection of land’ (recalling the same naming inspiration apparent in Purbeck, Dorset). Also in the Netherlands, there is Wulpen, once an island with villages (submerged since 1404) in the estuary of the Scheldt River, and another Wulpen in Belgium, both of which places, if indeed referring to curlews, literally just mean ‘curlews’. These places are certainly located in ideal territory for feeding waders. There are others in Germany, too, including Wülpensand, near the Elbe River on the outskirts of Hamburg.

Given this Germanic interest in naming places after curlews or coastal waders, one imagines there might have been a similar inclination in England, which is (and was) hardly wanting for suitable habitat. Alas, none has come down to us, but we do have some modern curlew places, named after the northern and Scots term for the curlew (also from the same root as huilpe). These are listed below, relatively modern as they are.

Whaupmoor (Northumbs)