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Forgotten Woodlands
- kgkglhlpppo 23d agoIn summer I live jn a place with a tiny dialect that like 6000 people still speak and when these reaearchers from X university come around I like making up plausible sounding words and telling them I heard my grandma say it at the hearth when I was a wee child Im powering humanity forward
- delichon 23d agoIf someday someone does this study for South Florida, they will wonder how a previously mountainous terrain became so flat. You can drive around and spot "Hills," "Heights,” “Ridge,” “Vista,” and “View” on pancake-flat sites. Hopefully there weren't ancient Scottish versions of real estate developers confounding this study.
- brudgers 23d agoMy favorite developer name is "Vista del Camino."
- nephihaha 22d agoView of the footpath?
- xhkkffbf 23d agoThe joke is that the real estate developments are named for what's been removed. But I guess that's not the case for some of these Florida developments.
- nephihaha 23d agoIn a low lying area, all these names can refer to far more smaller features than they would in hillier places. The "ridge" in question may have been only twenty foot tall for example, and smaller than a railway foundation. Some of these may have been artificial and built by native peoples. Others might be remnants of ancient tsunami and hurricanes, changing sea levels, floods and so on. The same phenomenon occurs elsewhere. The Netherlands have tiny features they call hills. In East Anglia, the flattest region of England, there are tiny hills. If you look at any pictures of the Gog Magog Hills south of Cambridge, you could walk up them barely breaking a sweat. In fact in some of the pictures, you'd struggle to spot the hills. In Scotland, they wouldn't even be considered a hill range.
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- KineticLensman 23d agoYes. My in-laws in East Anglia lived near Ramsey Heights, which (just checked my OS map) is almost entirely below the 10m contour. The nearby Ramsey Forty Foot mostly exceeds the 10m contour. They are great places for lazy cyclists but the downside side is the relatively high winds that are uninterrupted by terrain, and which always seem to orient themselves to be a local headwind.
- nephihaha 22d agoI had to look up Ramsey Heights but it looks to be in one of the flattest parts of East England! No one believes me, but there is a respectable example in Norwich called Kett's Hill. It's not huge, but it has enough of a slope on it to qualify as a hill, and I've walked up it.
- myself248 20d agoA twenty-foot ridge in Florida would be the tallest thing in the county and qualify for names like "Matterhorn".
- redwood 20d agoI'm guessing you've not been to South Florida
- mikestew 23d agoMy favorite is "Florida Hill Country" of Dade County. I raced a bicycle road race in Dade County once. It did, indeed, have a few hills, but the toughest climb of the whole race was literally an interstate overpass.
- nephihaha 22d agoThe equivalent study in Florida would be of native names and old Spanish ones at a stretch.
- dvh 23d agoSpeaking of forgotten woodlands, I've talked about this on HN two times already, might as well say it third time. Go on Google maps and look at the size of the Sherwood forest. I've never truly recovered from that experience.
- nephihaha 23d agoSherwood is not forgotten of course. Every fan of Robin Hood knows it. But it had the misfortune to be in an early industrial area. I mentioned Birnam Wood in another post, which features in MacBeth. Shakespeare plays fast and loose with Scottish history, but Birnam Wood was a real place. One or two of the old trees are still there, but not much. The area has been reforested a bit within the past two hundred years.
- Infernal 23d agoDid it used to be a lot bigger? Looks like a couple wooded lots side by side now.
- mr_toad 23d agoMuch much bigger. Visiting it now is quite sad.
- nephihaha 22d agoIf you go to England, you're better off going to the New Forest in Hampshire. Despite the name, it was established during the Norman period and at least feels like a substantial tract of older woodland. (Tiny by North American standards of course.)
- nephihaha 23d ago"Gaelic has been spoken at one time or another in the whole of Scotland, barring the north of Caithness..." It was spoken in the north of Caithness into the 20th century in Dounreay parish, and previously some other areas just to the west of Thurso. (There is evidence of past Gaelic usage in Dunnet parish, and if "the Caithness Book" is to be believed, even in Stroma, the most northerly part of Caithness.)
- nephihaha 23d agoOne of the ongoing debates in Scottish and Irish onomastics is about the Kil- prefix. It is usually connected with Cill meaning a monastic cell, but may be a corruption of Coille (wood) and Gil (a gill or ghyll). Kilduff in Fife may be Coille Dubh (black/dark wood). There are also names in Scotland referring to oaks, sacred groves and so on. Names like Cults outside Aberdeen may refer to forests. Calton Hill in Edinburgh appears to refer to hazel trees. Beith/Beath in placenames may refer to birch trees. This is without going into the Brythonic names, of which there are many.
- mnnuu 20d agoSimilar work done here looking at Pine Marten habitat in Cumbria based on historic place names: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2907.2001.00070.x https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2907.2001.00070.x
- Segv77 20d agoReminds me of the woods behind my childhood home, now just another housing development. We lose so much, so fast.
- clawforger_mthx 20d agoThis kind of hand-drawn map storytelling is what makes web maps feel alive instead of just dashboards. Curious how much of the art direction was done per-location vs a shared visual language across the whole story?