Anglo-Saxon Settlers
Northmoor itself (called More until the 14th c. when ‘North’ was added) coming from more, ‘a marsh’ and Moreton, its sister hamlet, more + tun, the ‘farmstead by a marsh’ both describe the ancient delta of the Windrush as it split into numerous channels running through half of the parish across the floodplain before joining the Thames.
At one point these channels passed around a slight rise, Ramsey, which even today is surrounded by watermeadows: hramsa + ieg, ‘dry ground in marsh where ramsons (wild garlic) grow’. As wild garlic likes to grow in shade, the name Ramsey also suggests that the Saxons found a small wooded rise in the flooplain.
These settlers named the side channels where shallow streams – lacu – flowed in the Thames; most familiar are Mortlake and Shiplake. Here Bablockhythe, Babba + lacu, the ‘stony stream or channel at Babba’s place’ sits at the northeastern boundary of the parish (‘hythe’ referring to the ferry landing place established in the 12th c.)
To the west of Northmoor sits Standlake by the Windrush river. Here stan + lacu, ‘shallow stream by the stones’, reminds us that Saxon settlers encountered more than just natural features in the landscape:
they found scattered through the fields the remains of ancient monuments – burial mounds and sacred ditches from the Bronze Age, and the humps and bumps of abandoned settlements from the Iron Age and Roman period.
Here the ‘stones’ are the Devil’s Quoits, a stone circle inserted into a large embanked henge monument built during the late Stone Age.
URL: D’s Qs site to be added
The common element that drew the Saxon settlers and those prehistoric builders to this place was water:
for the Saxons the rivers provided a means of transport, fish, wild fowl and building materials,
for Stone Age people the waters of the Thames and Windrush and the spring lines held a sacred significance, a living deity running through their lives..
URL: xxxx to be added