TOPOGRAPHICAL ETYMOLOGY. 79 
rush towards the sea. And towering above, with its brow 
and sides bristling with fragments of rocks and stones, is 
DUNKERRY-BEACON, which, from these physical charac- 
teristics, obtained the name which it now retains— 
Dvn-Cerre*— “the stony height.” These are names 
selected, for illustration, after a mere cursory glance over 
the district. Others there doubtless are equally striking, 
and equally indicative of the tenacity with which the names 
given by the aboriginal Britons have clung to the localities 
where they made their homes. 
Retraeing our steps eastward, we pass by WILLITON 
(the Weellas-town), which, with WırLs-neck (Wellas- 
neck) has, not without reason, been assigned to the Saxons, 
as names given by them to these localities while they were 
still occupied by the Welsh, or W@LLaAs, as the Saxons 
first called the Celtie race in Britain. Wethen come to 
the gradual opening or widening of the vale, south-west 
of the Quantocks, until it is lost in the wider plain of 
Taunton Dean ;—just what the British would have called 
LLEDYAD, from the verb llediannu—“to grow wide.” 
Here, I believe, we have the origin of Lydeard (given, in 
Domesday Book, and in an old map, f published A.p. 1610, 
as LEDIARD), standing, as it does, where the smaller vale 
gradually opens and widens into the broader expanse of 
Taunton Dean. 
Following the course of the river Ton£, which I find 
by Toulmin’s History, is represented by Whittaker as a 
form of Avon (T’avon, hence Tone) we come to Taunton 
* The C, in the Celtic dialects, has always the power of K. 
+ “Somerser-Suire Described and into Hunpreps devided, with 
the plott of the famous and most wholsom waters and eitie of the 
Bırue by I. $. Anno. 1610.” In tlie Museum of the Society at 
Taunton. 
