kent | A set of themed essays about Kent, a county in South East England, which include interactive maps and images. Kent has a rich history and provided inspiration for a number of writers and artists.

For many authors, real places and placenames offer an opportunity for playful reworking. Hardy’s Wessex is famously full of real places renamed, and characters whose names are drawn from the landscape, Jude Fawley, for instance, grows up in ‘Marygreen’, in reality Great Fawley. The author who most draws our attention to both the authorial and historical malleability Kentish placenames is Russell Hoban, an American who made England his home. His re-namings of places in Riddley Walker are deliberately evocative of a post-apocalyptic Kent in which people, landscapes and even place-names have been twisted:

“Standing above ‘Mr Clevvers Roaling Place’, you can see the ‘River Sour’. Directly below is ‘Widders Dump’, further out ‘Bernt Arse’. On a clear day, you can glimpse ‘Dunk Your Arse’. You will not find these places on an Ordnance Survey map, but, in a sense, they do exist. They are a corruption of contemporary placenames conjured by Russell Hoban in his cult novel Riddley Walker, a tale of a post-apocalypse Kent. They are, in order, the Devil’s Kneadingtrough - a dramatic chalk coombe (dry valley), the Stour, the hamlet of Withersdane, Ashford, and Dungeness. Hoban’s story is of a world reverted to the Iron Age, written in a degraded language most easily understood if read slowly and aloud.” (Vujakovic, 2017, p.134)

Hoban’s tale projects us several thousand years into the future and a Kent crawling out of nuclear catastrophe. Riddley, the books eponymous hero, narrates his experiences in a world that resembles the ‘Iron Age’ in terms of technology, economy, landscape and life-style (with similarities to the feudal world of Richard Jefferies, less readable, post-apocalyptic ‘After London’ (1905)). This article focuses on the use of placenames in Hoban’s novel, for a useful introduction to the text see the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition with an introduction by Will Self (see bibliography).

Riddley provides us with his own hand-drawn map of ‘Inland’, as much of his home region as he knows.

“THIS HERE IS MOSLY JUS PLACES IVE TOL OF IN THIS WRITING. I DON’T HAVE NO ROOM FOR THE WOAL OF EVERYTHING THERE IS IN INLAND [England?]”

His toponyms gain authority through cartographic representation – maps are power. His map shows a landscape impacted by sea-level change, the ‘Rivver Sour’ is now a tidal estuary as far inland as ‘Cambry’ (Canterbury), the Isle of Thanet is once again a real island (named the ‘The Ram’ after the town of Ramsgate), and the far tip of Dungeness is cut-off from the mainland (although retains its twentieth-century position and outline, an unlikely outcome after such a period of constant erosion and deposition). This new coastline is, in fact, a return to that of the late Iron Age and Roman eras.

Hoban reminds us that place-names should be meaningful and matter, today, sadly, place-names are simply ‘sounds’ to most people, however poetic or linked to a sense of belonging to a place and community. They certainly mattered and had meaning when people first created them. In his novel Riddley’s people have re-imagined names, now cast to represent the new reality on the ground. Today we rarely question the origins of the toponyms on maps or road signs, or in our heads, but by conjuring with place-names Hoban forces us to seek meaning.

Hoban creates the new place-names in a manner that would be meaningful to his characters, hence – ‘Good Mercy’ (Godmersham, (OE) ‘the homestead of Godmaer’) is a place of refuge for Riddley and others. The ‘dead towns’, devastated by war take on sinister, satirical appellations, Ashford becomes ‘Bernt Arse’ and Dover is ‘Do it Over’ while Canterbury ‘Cambry’ is surrounded by land labelled ‘The Barrens’. Others hold personal meaning (Riddley’s map as biography); Withersdane (possibly OE:

‘sheep pasture’) becomes ‘Widders Dump’ – ‘the widow maker’ - here Riddley’s father is crushed to death in front of Riddley while both are involved in excavating iron machinery of a by-gone age.

An interesting passage in Hoban’s book exposes any idea that renaming places is a simple artistic device and his interest stops there. The passage shows his deeper interest in how names may evolve by explicitly exploring the (albeit fictional) etymology of one of his folk-names. In a story within the story (‘The bloak as Got on Top of Aunty) he examines the origin of ‘HAGMANS IL’ (the present hamlet of Hinxhill). Permutations include ‘Hangmans Hil’ (an obvious etymology, and one with precedent in the English landscape (other variants include Gallows Hill)), ‘Hogmans Killen’ (where a man named Hogman fired pots in a kiln), and where he was murdered by his wife, so it mutates to ‘Hogmans Kil’. The name finally settles as ‘Hagmans Il’ – “becaws she ben a rough and ugly old woman and it come il he marrit her.” The protagonist of the story within the story even suggests a further change to ‘Hagmans Thril’ as the site where the ‘bloak’ managed to survive sexual intercourse with death (‘Aunty’).

Those of us familiar with the story and immersed in Riddley’s landscape may find themselves thinking in ‘Riddley speak’ for many localities (I do); some places do lend themselves to his tone and meaning, but not all. As a onetime resident of the Parish of Wye and Hinxhill, I do not think of Hinxhill as ‘Hagmans Il’, but rather as the evocative ‘Hengist Hill’, its purported origin being the Old English ‘Haenostesyle’ – ‘hill of the stallion or man named Hengist’ (OE hengest + hyll). Place-names are the markers on the map that tether your biography to the biography of the landscape.

Bibliography

Hoban, R. (2002) Riddley Walker: with introduction by Will Self [Bloomsbury: London] (originally published in 1980 by Jonathon Cape)
Mills. A. D. (1998) The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names [OUP: Oxford]
Vujakovic, P. (2017) ‘Mind the Gap’, Kent Life, May 2017, pp. 134-5.
Vujakovic, P. (2021) Map as biography: maps, memory, and landscape – thoughts on Ordnance Survey map, Sheet TR04, 1:25,000 Provisional Edition, Ashford, International Journal of Cartography, 7(2) special issue ‘Cartographers Write About Cartography’, pp. 190-197