Geograph - photograph every grid square

SJ2988 : Noctorum LaneSJ2988 : View across garden of Lantana, Noctorum LaneSJ2988 : Footpath to Noctorum Lane
SJ2988 : MiddlewoodSJ2988 : Rathmore


Noctorum

The great Swedish scholar of English place-names, Bror Oscar Eilert Ekwall (1877-1964), considered that the name of this leafy Birkenhead suburb derives from the Old Irish cnoc tirim (modern Gaelic tioram) meaning "dry hillock". It is recorded as Chenoterie in Domesday Book and as Cnoctirum or Cnoctyrum in 12th-century documents. The location makes his explanation plausible, as Irish settlers mooring in the Mersey or Dee estuaries might well have made their way through the coastal marshes and thickets of the Wirral to establish a settlement on this well-drained and easily-defended ridge commanding the flatter foreshore and sea approaches.

If this derivation is correct, it is one of the very few place-names of Gaelic origin in England apart from those that have been deliberately transferred from Scotland or Ireland. Curiously one of the other candidates is also in the same historic county of Cheshire, at Congleton which some think to perpetuate the name of an Irish settler Comhghall, though Professor Ekwall suggested it might rather derive from the Norse kang meaning a bend.