Richard Faulks
Words on waters
Chris McCully delves into the origins of the names given to still waters around the world
THERE ARE two pieces of water, little more than seeps in the moorland, visible from the road near Grimwith Reservoir in the Yorkshire Dales. It’s only recently that I’ve wondered what I should call them. Ponds — or pools? But how is a pond distinct from a pool? Or are they just very small lakes… or the relics of dams? Or are they lochans?
The default present-day English word for a body of still water is lake, a word exported both to North America (Lake Huron, the Great Lakes…) and the Antipodes, where a glance at Google Maps has already netted Lake Cowal and many others in New South Wales alone.
So ubiquitous is the word that it’s easy to forget that lake was borrowed from French lac in the 13th century. This meant “substantial body of still water surrounded by land”. Matters are complicated, however, by the prior existence of Old English (OE) lacu or lagu, a native Germanic word which could also mean “sea”: one 10th-century poem invokes lagustreamas, literally “sea-streams” (contextually, coastal currents).
I suspect that the borrowing of French lac was made more feasible by the existence of a prior English term which sounded similar and had similar connotations.
It’s easy to forget that lake was borrowed from French lac in the 13th century
The difference, however, is in context and size: from the beginning, lake in English meant something substantial, something probably freshwater and probably (though with striking exceptions) larger than a mere, which is another Germanic word. In OE, a mere was another kind of watery tract, of greater or lesser extent. In other tongues — German Meer, French mer, Spanish mar, Dutch maar — the pattern continues, where the word could mean something larger (German Mittelmeer, Mediterranean) or smaller (Dutch maar, drainage canal).
Windermere in England’s Lake District…
ANDREW Gustar: Flickr
…and neighbouring Ullswater.
Nekisa Gholami Babaahmady: Geograph.org.uk
A mere was the home of the monster Grendel (and his even more monstrous mother) in the epic poem Beowulf. The poet describes the mere as somewhere remote, surrounded by ice-covered trees, where flame plays strangely on water — a place so terrifying that it’s avoided even by hunted deer. It’s also measurelessly deep.
Depth seems to be the criterion that distinguishes a lake from a pond. Sunlight can penetrate the depths of a pond and generate weed growth. Sunlight may penetrate lake shallows too, but there will invariably be parts of a lake which are so deep that they’re weed-free. Not so with a pool (another Germanic word), which may be even smaller than a pond — and pool, of course, can also describe a feature of a river’s course. Yet there’s another diagnostic at play: a pond (OE pund, later pound) may be either natural (ponds formed by ancient river meanders, or by glacial action) or constructed (garden pond, stock pond), whereas a pool, if it’s a pool of still water, is most likely constructed (swimming/paddling pool).
A mere was the home of the monster Grendel (and his even more monstrous mother) in the epic poem Beowulf
Not only depth, but origin, size and purpose are, then, diagnostics that help to distinguish kinds of still water. Yet even a lake, for all its size and volume, probably isn’t as big as a -water – a Rutland Water, a Kielder Water. Originally, the word mere could be used to describe a larger body of water (think of Windermere in the English Lake District) but speakers didn’t seem altogether comfortable with that idea, particularly in the north of England, where there was Scandinavian settlement and bilingualism from the 9th century onwards.
Malham Tarn in the Yorkshire Dales, possibly England’s finest wild brown trout water.
Rob Denson
Scandinavian dialects had another word for lakes which could be borrowed into English: -vatn. Look at any map of Iceland today and you’ll see the country littered with -vatns: Hvitarvatn and Apavatn are just two (of thousands) I’ve encountered in a quick and random electronic search. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that using -water in proper names likely shows Scandinavian influence, and lists examples such as Elterwater, Mallewater (now Malham Tarn) and Havereswater (now Haweswater), all of which lie in areas of Scandinavian settlement.
Old habits die as hard as old names: once Windermere was called Windermere, it would have seemed merely perverse as well as euphonically questionable to rebadge it Winderwater
I’d also add a Scottish loch which I last fished nearly 50 years ago and which has entranced me ever since: Loch Watten. It’s no coincidence that Watten, too, was named in an area where for many centuries there was strong cultural and linguistic influence from Scandinavia.
Yet old habits die as hard as old names: once Windermere was called Windermere, it would have seemed merely perverse as well as euphonically questionable to rebadge it Winderwater. When, much later, Rutland and Kielder Waters in England were named, the naming reached for an ancient Norse alignment between morphology (the construction of words) and supposed grandeur.
Rutland Water in the UK is a water supply reservoir offering often unrivalled trout and predator fishing.
Richard Faulks
For all their size, Rutland Water and Kielder Water are, essentially, reservoirs. Reservoir was borrowed from French in the 17th century. It has had from the beginning the senses of artifice and of storage (compare French reserver), and its meaning overlaps with those of the structure which impounded the water in the first place, the dam.
Dam is a Germanic word first used in English in the 15th century to mean “bank or barrier of earth, masonry etc. constructed across a stream to obstruct its flow and raise its level”. Later, the term reservoir was borrowed and could be used to name the still water that lay above the dam. This is beautifully evidenced in County Durham, where (to take just one example) the sheet of still water lying at the head of Baldersdale is called Hury Reservoir, which was created by the building of Hury’s Dam (a massive artificial barrier).
I’ve encountered plenty of trout in reservoirs, but reservoirs aren’t of course exclusive to trout: pike and the other coarse fish may find reservoirs much to their liking. I look into the diaries to see whether I’ve caught any trout in dams and find very few dams and even fewer trout-from-dams.
Quake Lake on the Madison in Montana, definitely a lake, not a reservoir or dam. It was created after an earthquake struck in August 1959, damming the Madison River.
Andrew Flitcroft
Were I to fish in New Zealand or North America, however, I suspect I’d find myself catching plenty of trout in dams, since the word dam existed there as a colonial export many years before the term reservoir had been borrowed from French and belatedly exported to the former British colonies. Yet again, in parts of the American South, there was another, albeit localised, term in use to mean a still water impounded by a structure, or a meandering off-shoot of a lowland river.
That term came via French from Choctaw bayuk. If the bayou is anything like the water I once fished in Alabama then it will teem with smallmouth and largemouth bass, all of which will be preyed on by the alligator gar, a fish so huge and armoured that it seems like a reptilian tank.
If you’re Scottish, Welsh or Irish, all this talk of borrowings, engineering and artifice must seem remote. Before reservoirs and dams, ponds and pools, and long before the English language itself arrived in Britain, Celtic languages were spoken in these islands. The two branches of Celtic, the one (Brythonic) giving Welsh and Cornish, the other (Goidelic) Irish and Scots Gaelic, have interesting ways of naming still water.
If the bayou is anything like the water I once fished in Alabama then it will teem with smallmouth and largemouth bass
A loch in the wilds of Sutherland, Scotland.
Samantha Game
A Mayfly in a boat conjures thoughts of long drifts on Irish loughs.
Peter Gathercole
Scots has loch, a word which it lent to English in the 15th century, and Irish has lough. Both words have the same ultimate origin and both can mean either a lake or an arm of the sea. Interestingly, loughs are found in Northumberland as well as in Ireland — Greenlee and Broomlee loughs lie hard by Hadrian’s Wall, though it’s over 50 years since I fished them.
This anomaly arises because there was once extensive cultural and religious contact between the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria and the nexus of Celtic Christianity that lay to the north-west, in the kingdom of Dál Riada. As a result, the dialect of Old Northumbrian borrowed the word luh.
While we’re thinking of anomalies, there’s a water in Scotland that is a lake and not a loch: the Lake of Menteith, which was renamed by 19th century surveyors — one assumes they were English — from the original Loch of Menteith.
Scots loch has a diminutive in lochan, a useful word to denote a small body of still water. I’ve caught plenty of trout, and not a few sea-trout, in lochans over the years, and because they generally offer simpler angling challenges than reservoirs, lochs or lakes, I find myself smiling inwardly whenever I fish them.
One of two lakes at Llynnau Gamallt, in Wales. Llynnau is plural for Llyn.
Richard Faulks
Welsh has llyn, again meaning lake, though Welsh speakers wouldn’t thank you were you to rename Llyn Tegid (literally the lake of beauty, and the largest body of still water in Wales) as Bala Lake — unique in that it holds both grayling and gwyniad (a whitefish) as well as trout. I have never fished it.
Why does this matter? We fish in contexts, and those contexts are made by words. Words are and denote things, but they may also be used as reminders or carry memories and expectations. If you say reservoir I’ll reach for the trout or pike rods. If you say mere I’ll wonder about tench and carp. Loch/lochan will summon countless memories of Scotland, while lough will take imagination to the mayfly or to sea-trout in a rolling wave. I wouldn’t expect to catch charr in a pond, and a gwyniad could come only from a llyn.
Why does this matter? We fish in contexts, and those contexts are made by words
All of which brings me back to those seeps in the moor near Grimwith. I’ve just looked them up on a large-scale map — something I should have done 60 years ago. One of these seeps is large enough to have a name — Blow Tarn. Tarns are smaller bodies of still water found across upland parts of Yorkshire, Durham and the Lake District. They hold trout and perch, and some may hold charr. Defined in the OED as a “small mountain lake, having no significant tributaries”, tarn has a noteworthy etymology in Old Norse.
A trek up to Red Tarn in England’s Lake District.
Matt Eastham
Worth the climb — complete solitude and hungry trout.
Matt Eastham
Pretty too!
Matt Eastham
Tarns in northern England are found in areas subject to Danish or later Norse settlement in the 9th–11th centuries. One local contact claimed recently that because such a water was shaped like a droplet, tarn was related to the word for tears in Old Norse (tár). I haven’t been able to verify that, but — having fished a number of tarns over the years, with indifferent success — it touches me greatly to imagine that our northern ancestors might once have scanned the waters of this strange, new country and there found tears.
(with thanks to Mollie Lord, who told me about the tears)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris McCully
Chris McCully has been fishing since 1966. He has written a number of angling books, the most recent being Fly-Fishing for Irish Sea-Trout (Medlar Press, 2025).
