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Forgotten Woodlands

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91 pointsNaOH28 comments

If 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.

The 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.

In 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.

Yes. 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.

I 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.

A twenty-foot ridge in Florida would be the tallest thing in the county and qualify for names like "Matterhorn".

I'm guessing you've not been to South Florida

My favorite developer name is "Vista del Camino."

View of the footpath?

My 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.

The equivalent study in Florida would be of native names and old Spanish ones at a stretch.

Speaking 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.

Sherwood 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.

Did it used to be a lot bigger? Looks like a couple wooded lots side by side now.

Much much bigger. Visiting it now is quite sad.

If 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.)

Things with 'new' in the name tend to age quite rapidly. See also Oxford's New College.

Or the Pont-neuf ("new bridge") in Paris being the oldest one in the city.

Forest was more of a legal term, and tended to be focused on deer than trees.

"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.)

Similar 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

One 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.

This 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?

Reminds me of the woods behind my childhood home, now just another housing development. We lose so much, so fast.

In 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

No, you're poisoning any research into an endangered language. Do we have to remind everyone of the Scots Wikipedia fiasco?

I have not heard of the Scots Wikipedia fiasco.

Very short version: one autistic US teenager wrote a massive majority of the Scots Wikipedia by copying the English Wikipedia, doing find-and-replace for a limited collection of words and rewriting the rest in a phonetic transcription of Mel Gibson in Braveheart. I'm not going to take a side on the "language or dialect" argument with Scots but it's definitely got it's own specific grammar quirks and ways of speaking that were utterly destroyed by this approach. Scots Wikipiedia had to effectively be rolled back several years and there's some evidence to suggest that in that time AI had ingested the data and caused actual damage to the AI's ability to produce realistic Scots.

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