Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
man would say, with a two-seated car going along the middle of the road at
a fair pace. Once, twice, thrice our horn sounded, but the occupants of
that car never heard us. At last, keeping well to the off-side of the road,
and when our bonnet was level with their rear off-wheel, Mr. Johnson and I
gave a simultaneous and stentorian yell; and the two pairs of goggles that
were turned upon us, who were then, as nearly always, un-goggled, clearly
covered four eyes starting with surprise. It was a lesson to them and to us
of the very poor penetrative power of a motor-horn in relation to
motor-cars in front, and of the necessity of looking behind you now and
again, especially if you be in a noisy car. So that two-seated car was
passed as if it had been standing still, and the lot of the
dust-recipient, which one or other must needs endure for a while, was
transferred from us to them; but they were not called upon to endure it,
nor could they have kept it if they had so desired, for any length of time.
So hey for Watton, near which lies Weyland Wood, fondly famous in local
story as being the identical wood in which the ill-fated babes in the wood
were lost. That is a tradition as to the origin and true locality of which,
so far as I know, even the most ardent folk-lorists have not concerned
themselves very seriously, and certainly the likeness of sound between
"Weyland" and "Wailing" may have caused it to be localized here. As it
happens, however, there is a very much simpler explanation of the name of
the wood and of the Hundred in which it is situated. Weyland is simply the
modern representation of the "Wanelunt" of _Domesday_, and that again is
simply descriptive, like Blacklands in Berks, and the names of scores of
Hundreds besides. For "Wanelunt" is just "wan land," and a more wan land
than this, from the agricultural point of view, it would be hard to find.
Islington in Norfolk may be, in all probability was, the place in which the
Bailiff's daughter lived and was beloved by the squire's son, but Weyland
Wood cannot detain us. It has no more claim to this particular honour than
a hundred other woods in other parts of the kingdom have, except upon an
etymological basis, and that has the trifling disadvantage of being quite
wrong.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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