PLYMPTON OASTLE. 247 
now the site of the railway station, and so on up the Newnham 
valley ; the latter running up the Plympton valley, its waters 
mingling with the stream, now a small one, which still comes down 
at the back of the houses on the south side of the main street of 
Plympton. At the head of this valley the position of defence was 
laid out ; and whether it was a stronghold of the Briton, or was 
formed by his successors, his conquerors, or whether the Dane took 
possession of it and raised his fort there, no one can deny that in 
these early times the site must have been an important one, and 
that a population there settled must have needed a resort for safety 
and protection. I do not think, however, that the Dane obtained a 
settlement there. We have strong evidence of his having done so 
in other parts of the county, more especially north of Tavistock, 
but nothing is recorded to justify us in supposing that he gained 
any permanent settlement in this place. | 
The name Plympton is Saxon without doubt. “The suffix ‘ton’ 
constitutes a sort of test-word,” says Mr. Isaac Taylor, “by which 
we are able to discriminate the Anglo-Saxon settlement.”* ‘A tun 
or ‘ton’ was a place surrounded by a hedge, or rudely fortified by 
a palisade ;” and if the fortified enclosure at Plympton, formed by 
the English colonist on the stronghold wrested from the Kelt, had 
an earlier name, it is lost in that given it by the conqueror, and 
now preserved to us.f The derivation of the remaining half of 
the word is not so clear. Superficially it would be said to mean the 
town on the Plym, the river. But if it were so, from whence does 
the river obtain its name? It cannot be the town upon the river 
Plym, simply because the town is not, and never was, upon the 
river we now know by that name. The water round about Plympton 
was tidal, fed to some extent—a slight one—by springs, but for the 
most part water from the sea. The nearest stream is the Torry river, 
or Torry brook, which I take to be an older word than Plympton.{ 
The river Plym flows and flowed much in the same direction now 
as In pre-Norman times, a considerable distance from Plympton. 
Dyer, of Exeter, in one of his amusing books§ lays it down 
positively that the word is a compound one of three syllables ; 
that “P” stands for the Keltic “pen,” a head; “‘leim,” or “lim,” | 
* “¢ Words and Places,’ 3rd ed., p. 78. 
+ Stubbs, “ Const. Hist. Eng.,” vol. i. p. 82. 
{ Keltic, Tor = high rock, Rhe = water. 
§ “Vulgar Errors,” p. xxix. “Antient Mode of bestowing Names,” p. 74. 
R 2 
