Place names

All vernacular place names, personal names, and names of roads or rivers encode important knowledge. Some of that knowledge is a thumbnail history; for example Maiden Lane denotes the lane where five spinster sisters once lived, while Cider Hill Road is the road up the hill where the Cider Mill and orchard once stood. At one time, when the name became fixed, it was probably the most relevant and useful name for local inhabitants. Other names refer to geographical features: Mica Ridge Road, Bare Rock Road, Ball Brook Road. The sum of roads and place names in a small place, in fact, amounts to something of a local geography and history if one knows the stories, features, episodes, and family enterprises encoded within them.

For officials who require a radically different form of order, such local knowledge, however quaint, is illegible. It privileges particular knowledge over synoptic, standardized knowledge. In the case of colonial rule, when the conquerors speak an entirely different language, the unintelligibility of the vernacular landscape is a nearly insurmountable obstacle to effective rule. Renaming much of the landscape therefore is an essential step of imperial rule. This explains why the British Ordinance Survey of Ireland in the 1830s recorded and rendered many local Gaelic place names (e.g., Bun na hAbhann, Gaelic for “mouth of the river”) in a form (Burnfoot) more easily understood by the rulers.

The Trouble With the View from Above