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Turtle dove - OE turtur, turtle, tortur

There are some species of bird that are curiously absent from the place-name record. Corncrake, for instance, and nightingale; how was is that these species which would have been so conspicuous in song and so much more populous in earlier centuries aren’t in place-names. (It’s a fantasy of mine to return to medieval rural England and know what it would have been like to hear corncrakes crak-craking from every meadow.) The turtle dove is another such bird. Almost vanishingly rare now, but once a common species which would have been heard throughout summer up and down the land. Like the nightingale, it was also familiar from literature, hence its Old English name taken verbatim from Latin: the onomatopoeic turtur which became turtle early on.

There is, however, one possible surviving turtle dove place-name. A charter describing land near Wick in Worcestershire mentions turtlingcford, which landscape historian Della Hooke has suggested may refer to the turtle dove. It’s true that there is nothing else in the Old English vocabulary that equates to what seems like a nonsense word. The ‘c’ is almost certainly a scribe’s error, and the ‘ing’ part of name may have the sense simple of ‘place’ (there are other names in which this is the case, or maybe exists to link the other two elements in the name ‘turtle’ and ‘ford’ in some fashion). The name, therefore, may mean something like ‘the ford at the turtle dove’s place’, or ‘the ford where turtle doves can be found/heard’.

Turtingford (Worcs), a landmark described in a 10th cen. charter relating to St-John-in-Bedwardine (lost) somewhere on the outskirts of modern Worcester.

Sources (see ‘About’ page for the full bibliography): Hooke, ‘Bird, Beasts’; langscape.org.uk.

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