n 



inhabitants of the district merely as a dialectic term until Words- 

 worth incorporated it in his writings. It is now an accepted 

 English word, and in the Lake District, at least, has supplanted 

 the use of the Italian exotic, cascade. 



An interesting question connected with this concluding part 

 of my subject arises here. How came these Norwegian place- 

 names into the English Lake District 1 Neither chronicle nor 

 history can give an answer. There is no recorded invasion or 

 irruption of Norwegians into this part of the country. Towards 

 the latter end of the ninth century the Danes marched northwards 

 from the Humber, entered Northumberland, and effected a 

 permanent settlement in that county. These Northumbrian 

 Danes made incursions into Cumberland, destroyed at one time 

 the City of Carlisle, and, if we may be guided by the evidence of 

 village names, colonies of them must have settled in the more 

 open and fertile parts of Cumberland and Westmoreland, for there 

 is a cordon of Danish place-names extending from Appleby north- 

 wards along the vale of the Eden to the north of Carlisle, thence 

 across the Cumberland plain to AUonby, and along the belt of 

 coast country as far as Ravenglass in the south again. Of these 

 distinctively Danish names, all terminating in the suffix — by, an 

 abode, there are more than sixty in the two counties, but not one, 

 I think, in the region of the Lake District proper. We may fairly 

 infer, then, that the Danes did not settle as colonists in the fell- 

 dales. If Ferguson in his interesting work on the Northmen in 

 Cumberland and Westmorland, has given a satisfactory answer to 

 the question, then one more proof is afforded of the value of the 

 study of languages and place-names as a means of throwing light 

 upon obscure points often met with in the study of history and 

 ethnology. In the absence of all historical evidence he has shown 

 conclusively, I think, by a careful comparison of the language and 

 place-names of the colonists of the Isle of Man, with the dialect 

 and place-names peculiar to the Lake District, that the dales and 

 i^alleys of the mountainous regions must have been seized upon 

 and colonised by men of Norwegian blood from the Isle of Man. 

 This theory is strengthened by the fact that many of the holdings 



