Mind your language | 5 June 2010

I was interested to see in the Daily Telegraph a suggestion, in an article marking the 60th anniversary of The Archers, that the original name of the river that runs through Ambridge was the Ambra. Today it is called the Am, but, like the Cam in Cambridge, that is a back-formation from the name of the town. There is a river Amber in Derbyshire, and ambra is a pre-Saxon Celtic word meaning ‘water’. It is related to the Latin imber, meaning ‘rain’ — or ‘showers’ as the Book of Common Prayer translates it in the Benedicite.

There are some puzzles in the place-names of Borsetshire, a county deriving its name from the tribe known to the Romans as the Bornovaria. After the Saxons came, the territory was known as Born-saete, where saete means ‘people’. Borsetshire is not mentioned in Domesday Book, but a 12th-century manuscript calls it Borsaetescir.