The place-names of Bury are legendary and a source of constant frustration and confusion to historians. The difficulty of research is aggravated by the scarcity of reliable and respectable authorities. To the topographer, etymologist, specialist philologer, the meanings of place-names are an aid to the date and purpose of foundation in the absence or avoidance of plentiful historical records - the analysis of language where possible or acceptable - a key to early settlement.
The Bury Place-Name Survey departs astutely from this noble ideal in two particular ways. With luck, it will serve as a gazetteer or practical map for visitors who wish to find their way around a town whose landscape has been changing dramatically over the last twenty-five years. Two major motorways divide the modern town. Retailing on a grand scale has eclipsed industrial manufacturing, landmarks which have stood for one hundred or even two hundred years. Open fields and familiar landscapes which have dominated the view for a thousand years have spawned a rash of modern housing estates and all but erased their memory. The Bury Place-Name Survey has recorded every name on maps of the township of the last a hundred and fifty years under eleven geographic classifications. With rare exceptions it has extracted every name, from pubs and streets to churches and chapels, from rivers and lakes and moorland to valleys and fields. Popular mapping which would be easily recognised today probably dates to the 1837 Tithe Map, significant where it precedes much of the growth of the Industrial Revolution, important where it indicates sharp political and social change, but in some ways still unreliable and unbalanced.
Secondly, the Bury Place-Name Survey and its more academic peers differ in being concerned with identity rather than meaning. Change is everywhere and constant, and the Bury Place-Name Survey has been concerned rather to record and identify names than to explain them. History gives continuity and distinction to the Heritage, but place-names lend dynamism and variety to history - a pageant, indeed a kaleidoscope, of movement, action, and energy. But identity has met with two major difficulties of scale. The key to the Bury Place-Name Survey is the ordnance Survey Ten Figure Grid Reference, (of the form, “XX nnnn nnnn”, where “XX” represents the two character, alphabetic Grid Code, and “nnnn” are the four digit, numeric geographical co-ordinates of longitude and latitude). This system was chosen in order to integrate with other gazetteers and maps nationwide, and because it is a widely accepted standard for mapping with an assured future. Unfortunately compression implies confusion, and place-names tend to cluster around nodal points. The precision of the Ordnance Survey is to within a hundred square yards !
A more pressing concern, a more debilitating restriction, is the fact that the Bury Place-Name Survey represents only the detailed investigation of the town centre of the former county borough of Bury, an area comprising perhaps only four square kilometres. In fact this has engaged the time of some half a dozen scribes over a period of twelve months, though already the effort is beginning to bear fruit.
Charles R.N. Walker
The BURY LOCAL HISTORY SOCIETY work on the Bury Place Names Survey has reached a point where the data collected can be listed on a useable database.
To open the search page of the database just click on the BPNS plaque on the right.
