TEESDALE PLACE-NAMES. O 



'■'■ Batts. — 1. Low flat grounds adjoining rivers, and some- 

 times islands in rivers. IS'orth. 2. Short ridges." 



In " The Polks of Shields," by W. Brockie, " Bates, latts or 

 halts, flat grounds occasionally overflowed by rivers." 



And in the Supplement to Jamieson's Etymological Dic- 

 tionary, " Bat, a holme, a river island." 



Batts, short ridges — odd corners of fields. Isle of "Wight 

 G-loss. Eng. Dialect Soc. Vol. 32. C. 



In the county of Durham, " The Batts" means a flat low- 

 lying place by a riverside, waste, sandy, stony, overgrown with 

 willows, furze, weeds, &c., liable to be flooded when the river 

 is out. Near to and below Witton-le-Wear is such a place, 

 called '' The Batts," where, on the 5th November, we used, as 

 schoolboys, to celebrate Gunpowder Plot, sixty years ago, by 

 making bonfires and letting off fireworks, by making during the 

 day, and burning in the evening, a large stack of furze or 

 whins, and when the stack was well burnt down, by rushing 

 through the fire and smoke one after another, somewhat, as I 

 now suppose, like the ancient Saxons or Britons at their Baal 

 fires, at midsummer. 



At Bishop Auckland and at "Willington and other places, both 

 up and down the Wear, similar places are to be found with the 

 same name. 



At Selaby, on the Tees, they are called Basses. 



" In the Whitby Glossary, published by the English Dialect 

 Society, Bats, s. pL, are patches of shore land liable to be over- 

 flowed by the higher tides." 



It might have been a question, if no better explanation were 

 at hand, whether ' Batavia,' the name by which Holland was 

 known to the Romans, had not arisen from some local word like 

 hatt, used in that low-lying, flat, marshy district, intersected 

 and liable to be overflowed with water, to designate the country, 

 and that word had been latinized by the conquerors. If this 

 had been so, the conquered would have been the inhabitants of 

 Batts or low countries. There is no single Latin word corres- 

 ponding to batts, only loca demissa or palustria. 



