Recently @NotJustLakes wanted to know how we all pronounce Scafell, i.e. the Scar vs Scaw debate which I'd recently been having with my mum. The modern pronunciation is Scar (or ska!) - but western roots know it as Scaw. Twitter and Wikipedia quickly confirmed that "Formerly the name was spelled Scawfell, which better reflects local pronunciation." Someone spelled it wrongly on an eighteenth century map; unusually Ordnance Survey didn't reinstate the local pronunciation; visitors and offcomers to the second and third generation start to pronounce it how it's spelled, long-rooted locals, nearby offcomers and the curious pronounce it the old way.
There are Sca*fell Roads all over the county - about half spelled each way - and it's likely that a high proportion of those are estates built in the last 70 years, suggesting that spelling as well as pronunciation isn't long fixed.
That reminded me of Scaws Infants in Penrith - on the Scaws estate - I guess there was Scaws Juniors too (but I was too young,and they merged to become Beaconside. Between Scawfell and the Scaws estate we have two very similar names showing the east and west Viking incursions into Cumbria. Scawfell in the west is from the Norwegian Old Norse skalli fjall, where skalli is shieling (skiul in Danish) or bald (try this) or skagi fjall, where skagi is headland*. Scaws estate in the east, on the other hand, is from skoven, Danish woods (skogen in Norwegian)**
In August's Cumbria Life, Caz Graham suggested that useful things kids should learn at (Cumbrian) schools included "how to say Torpenhow, Bouth, Burgh and Skelwith in a manner that will confuse tourists". Even when you know Burgh, how about the nearby Powburgh beck? Pohbruff? P-ow-bruff?
Earlier in the year, before I left London, Lord Oakeshott asked me over dinner (I worked with his wife; I was amused to have dinner with a lord) whether my home town was pronounced PENrith or penRITH? Given that Virgin Trains and their often Scottish crew, say CarLISLE and penRITH, and that's where I'd most commonly heard the names spoken for 25 years, I found myself uncertain about the town I grew up in. Mum explained: in general in a two-syllable name we stress the first (and wherever possible we put a schwa in the second syllable). So
CARlisle, PENruth, THRELkuld, SCAWfull (allegedly; the 'full' is debated here!), WAZdull, WARcup, etc.
But there's no accounting for Aspatria, of course.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scafell_Pike and http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scaw
**Cumberland & Westmorland, Ancient and modern: the people, dialect, superstitions and customs (1857) Jeremiah Sullivan, p49, p95
Milli fjallanna og fjarðarins
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