One lane, ten names!

For my first blog post on the theme of ‘ten’ (for the Society’s tenth anniversary; social media hashtag #OnePlaceStudies10) I decided to investigate a lane in my Waters Upton one-place study. This minor road runs from Waters Upton village to a tiny settlement in the south-eastern corner of the parish, The Terrill. The name of this lane – and some of the property associated with it – has been written in a variety of ways over the years and I had a feeling there might have been as many as ten different spellings. So I did a bit of digging, and found the following:

1. Caspish Lane – The earliest written reference I have found for this lane was in the record of a baptism which took place on 10 October 1782. Curiously, when this entry was made in respect of Ann, daughter of John and Ann Ouls, the lane was described as being in neighbouring Ercal (Ercall Magna) parish.
2. Caspich Lane – Another child of John and Ann, Thomas, was baptised at Waters Upton on 20 April 1788. This time, the family’s surname was written as Houls, and the spelling of the name of the road where the family lived also changed slightly.
3. Castpit Lane – We’re looking at the parish register again, but have jumped forward to the 1850s, when Ellen, daughter of Morris and Elizabeth Evans of Castpit Lane was baptised on 5 October 1856.
4. Caspit Lane – Within three months of the above ceremony, on 4 January 1857, there was another baptism in which the lane, with another variation of its spelling, was given as the family’s abode. The child was Mary Ann, daughter of John and Elizabeth Skitt.
5. Catsbritch – Part of a ‘double’ name (Far Britch and Catsbritch) for a parcel of land near the lane, recorded on the Tithe Apportionment Schedule of 1837. This spelling, applied to the lane, later appeared on one of the Ordnance Survey’s 25 inch to the mile maps covering part of Waters Upton parish, published in 1902. It then became more or less fixed as the standard name and this is the spelling in use today. (The map below is an extract from later Ordnance Survey mapping, printed at a scale of 1:25,000.)

6. Casbritch – The Tithe Apportionment Schedule of 1837 also recorded three adjoining fields named Long Casbritch, Far Casbritch, and Near Casbritch (the last-named lying immediately to the West of the lane).
7. Castpits Lane – the census of 1871 was the first one on which the name of this lane appeared. The enumerator, describing his enumeration district, referred to it as Castpits Lane – but he also referred to…
8. Catsbrich Toll House and Bars / Cat’s Brich Bars – Situated on Castpits Lane, but the name given to the toll house and bars was written with two variants of a different spelling. The first version appeared in the enumeration district description mentioned above, the second version on the schedule summarising the household census returns.
9. Catspit Lane – Two more census enumeration district descriptions – in 1891 and 1901 – both featured this particular spelling.
10. Catsbrick Lane – The Ordnance Survey might have made Catsbritch Lane the definitive version of this road’s appellation in 1902, but that didn’t stop 1921 census enumerator Edgar Percy Davies from going his own way. He used this spelling in his brief description of the Waters Upton enumeration district.

To summarise, over the course of 140 years of written records, the first part of this lane’s name evolved from ‘Cas’ to ‘Cats,’ with ‘Cast’ also appearing. The second part meanwhile changed from ‘pish’ and ‘pich,’ to ‘pit’ and ‘pits,’ and ultimately to ‘brich’ and ‘britch’ (and on one occasion, ‘brick’).
What might the origins of this changeable name be – could its etymology be enlightening? I decided to approach this research backwards, as it were, by starting with the second part of the name.

One obvious possibility is that the name referenced a pit of some kind. The 1837 Tithe Apportionment Schedule for Waters Upton included two fields described (in whole or in part) as Kynnersley Pit. There was also a single parcel of land called Great Britch & Marlpit Croft. This suggests the potential for there to have been a marl pit, now long gone, but after which the lane from Waters Upton to The Terrill was named.
The ‘Great Britch’ element of that last-mentioned field name points in another direction however. Including those already mentioned, there were in total 16 parcels of land which had ‘Britch’ as part, or as the whole, of their names: Britch x 4, Long Britch x 2, Upper Britch x 2, and one each of Lower Britch, Britch Head, and Far Britch. All of them lay in the south-eastern part of the parish near – or right next to – the road now known as Catsbritch Lane, and all were arable fields.

A bit of Googling led me to various sources including a thesis by David Horovitz, A survey and analysis of the place-names of Staffordshire. From these sources I learned that the word britch and variants of it (including brache, breche, bruche, brych and even bridge) occur in many other place names in England. It is derived from an Old English word referring to land recently cleared or broken up for cultivation, and there are examples of it being used in conjunction with personal names.

So Catsbritch Lane may have a name with origins going back several hundred years – to a time when the uncultivated land it led to, perhaps belonging to someone with the Old English personal name Catt, was cleared and broken up, ready to be planted with crops.
Steve Jackson