164 



The Names of Places in Wiltshire. 



or Guar-dour, wliicli is the same as the one we are now 

 considering, and which he explains as meaning " the summit 

 near the water." 



7. Wyly. The name of a river, and also of a village situated upon it 



in the south of Wilts. This no doubt is a British name, 

 for in Carmarthenshire you have a river Gwili, which is 

 evidently the same word, and possibly its original form. 

 There is in Welsh a word gwili, which signifies full of turns, 

 e.g., winding. 1 Welsh scholars however tell us that its root 

 is the word gwy? which signified a " flow or flood."" We 

 have the word itself in the river Wye. The name Con-way 

 is said to mean Cyn-wge (=chief river). In Hants and 

 Dorset, the word takes the form of ivey, and gives names 

 respectively to Wey-hri&ge, and Wey -mouth. From the 

 name Wyly we have Wil-ton formerly a chief place in the 

 county, and Wil-tun-schire (now Wiltshire) . We meet also 

 with the name Wyly-bourn, e.g., literally the " stream of 

 the Wyly/' denoting a portion of the county in its im- 

 mediate vicinity, though strictly applicable to the branch 

 stream that flows through the Winterbourns and joins the 

 main stream at Stapleford. 



8. Nodder. A natural derivation of this word would seem to be from 



the Welsh neidr (the word is in Anglo-Saxon as naddre), 

 which means a snake or adder, — no inappropriate name for, a 

 winding stream. But there are several rivers in England 

 that seem to be derived from a root similar to that from which 

 Nodder (or Nadder) may have originally come. The Nydde, 



1 In like manner the Cam is said to be so termed because " crooked" or 

 " winding" in its course, from the Sansc. kamp, and the Gael, and Welsh cam, 

 signifying to bend. 



2 Other derivations have been suggested. Some for instance have traced it to 



Anglo-Saxon wylig a willow ; whilst Spencer, in his Faery Q-ueene, has a 



pleasant conceit respecting it, far more suited to poetry than prose : — 



" Next him came, Wylibourne with passage sly, 

 That of his wilinesse his name doth take 

 And of himself doth name the Shire thereby." 



There is a paper in the first vol. of the Philological Society's Magazine by 

 Walters, on the derivation of the Welsh word Gwy. 



