72 NAMES OF PLACES 



Celts. He tells us that they called the Land's End 

 Belerion, and that they conveyed the tin which they 

 worked in Cornish mines 'to a certain island lying off 

 Britain called Ictis.' Belerion is lost, but Ictis seems to 

 be the same as Vectis, so rendered by the Romans, and 

 handed down to us as the Isle of Wight. Now the lan- 

 guage of these primitive Silurians has disappeared, and, 

 forasmuch as it never was written, it is hopeless to attempt 

 any solution of the meaning of names framed in it. But 

 probably we use a good many of them unconsciously, 

 seeing how many place-names fail to receive any light 

 even when traced back to their oldest written forms. 



The occupation by the Celts was doubtless far more 

 effective and implied a higher degree of civilisation than 

 that of the Silurians. It is no matter for surprise, 

 therefore, that they impressed many names in their own 

 language upon the land, which succeeding waves of 

 Roman, Saxon, and Norseman have not prevailed to 

 obliterate. There is a substratum of Gaelic in the topo- 

 graphy of the most thoroughly English counties, and 

 one stumbles unexpectedly at times upon names almost 

 unchanged. Fishing one summer on the Test, near 

 Wherwell, I was allotted a dark, deep stretch of water as 

 my beat. I was startled to hear it spoken of as 'the 

 Dublin' — the black 'linn' or Avater — the same feature 

 that gives its title to the capital of Ireland. 



After the Celts came the Romans, whose rule over a great 

 part of Britain endured for nearly four centuries. But 

 their conquest differed from that of the Celts ; it was not 

 a national migration — not the movement of a race seeking 

 relief from pressure — but a military invasion and occupa- 

 tion by troops recruited largely from the Continental Celts 



