English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Obviously some houses bear their names from characteristic features one is supposed to grasp presently.
I have just run into this one: "Barrow Elm House".
I do know what a barrow is and what an elm is. What I do not understand here is the logical or semantic link between the two.
As a barrow can also be an "ancient burial mound" (Webster International Dictionary), does "Barrow Elm" mean the house sits on such a mound covered or ornamented with elms? Or am I missing something more elementary?
The elm tree has a symbolic connection with death and the Underworld. See this information from the Woodland Trust:
Elms used to be associated with melancholy and death, perhaps because the trees can drop dead branches without warning. Elm wood was also the preferred choice for coffins.
Given that symbolism, I think it's likely that elms have long been associated with burial mounds ("barrows"), and that the house is (or used to be) located near a barrow with elms nearby.
(Extra notes: a Google search indicates that this placename is not at all unusual in the UK. Also, a glance at an Ordnance Survey map for the UK countryside shows a lot of barrows - they're marked as "tumulus" - so it's not a stretch to say that a lot of houses have been near these at some point.)
I don't know where that house is, but Wikipedia tells us there is a Barrow Elm near Hatherop:
Barrow Elm, about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southeast of the village, is a prehistoric tumulus.
A house placed at, near, or on the road to, that place could well be named after it. The singular elm seems to indicate that there was a single elm. You don't need many trees to give a place a name :)
Barrow Elm is the name of a place. It doesn't need to make analytical sense, any more than "London" needs to make sense.
As others have said -- and probably beaten to death -- a name does not have to make sense. Specifically, a name is not a sentence or even necessarily a grammatically correct fragment of a sentence.
"Elm" of course is a kind of tree. In the context of a place name I assume "barrow" refers to a dirt mound.
This one strikes me as a little bit odd because of the ordering of the words. If someone called a place "Elm Barrow", I'd take that to mean that it was on or near a barrow that was covered or surrounded by elm trees, or at least that had one or two prominent elm trees in the vicinity. That is, "barrow" is a noun and "elm" is used as an adjective describing something about the barrow.
But "Barrow Elm" is backwards. There can't be a barrow sitting on an elm tree.
But as it's a name, maybe whoever made it up just liked the sound better if you switched the two around. Or maybe they are intended to be unrelated: there is a barrow and there are some elms. I don't know how you could know without asking the person.
I just checked a dictionary and I see that "Barrow" is also the name of a river in Ireland. Perhaps the person who named this place was thinking of that river and of an elm tree that grows along that river -- a "Barrow elm".
I see that "barrow" can also mean a castrated pig. The tree belonging to this pig, or where this pig lives? "My pig's tree" seems a funny thing to want to call a place, but as I'd never heard that definition of the word before, I don't know the connotations.
As has already been said, there is no guarantee that the name chosen makes any sense. However, there is a plausible etymology if the name did arise organically.
It has not been uncommon in England for names to be given to significant trees. For example, this Google Books link:
discusses trees called the Gibbet Tree, the Court Tree, and the Barrow Elm. These were notable trees used for public purposes. In the case discussed, the Barrow Elm appears to have been on or near a barrow, but that may not always have been the case; "barrow" could have arisen from the name of a settlement, or a corruption of a similar word such as "borough."
Then, once the tree gained that name in the neighborhood, it would be natural to name the new property after the older and more widely known tree.
In other words: I think everyone who is trying to work out a semantic meaning such as:
The house that is by the elm that is near the barrow
is missing the mark. The meaning of the name when it was applied to the property--again, assuming there was one at all--was more likely something closer to:
The property on which the tree everyone calls the "Barrow Elm" is located.
