Hurrack Raine

All fields have names known to the people who farm them, even if they are such simple terms as Top Pasture, Bottom Pasture, or West or East Meadow. However, some field names are much more interesting – relicts of events or activities stretching back perhaps as far as Anglo-Saxon times, and using curious Old English, Old Norse or Old French words. Some have survived faithfully intact after centuries, while others have been corrupted over time.

In upper Swaledale, near the village of Fremington, there was a field-name recorded in the 1840s as Hurrack Raine. Today, most of it remains in use as a field although part of it is now the site of a row of houses. It’s a distinctive field in that part of its long eastern side is formed by 150 metres of a surviving section of one of the ancient Grinton-Fremington Dykes. And it was the dyke that gave rise to the field name.

Hurrock/hurrack is an old North Country dialect word apparently meaning a pile of stones or rubbish or anything in a loose heap. It is derived from a Norwegian dialect form of an Old Norse word, horg, meaning a heap or a confused mass.

In a collection of folklore stories published between 1846 and 1859 by Michael Aislabie Denham from Piercebridge in Teesdale, it was said that when Sir Henry Vane was negotiating to buy Raby Castle near Barnard Castle from the Crown in 1626, he attempted to depress the price by describing it as ‘only a hurrock of stones’.

In a record dated 1533 and preserved at the North Yorkshire County Record Office in Northallerton, the phrase ‘a greate hurroke of stanis’ appears in a description of one of the upper Swaledale moorland markers, defining the eastern boundary of Cogden Township, next to Ellerton.

Raine is another Old Norse word, also found in Old English, meaning a balk in a field, especially one serving as a boundary, but not necessarily a large structure. The word has been used with many different spellings to describe various linear features serving as boundaries or divisions, such as the small banks created over time between medieval strip-fields or lynchets, a line created where an old hedge has been taken up, or even a ditch. It has also come to mean in some circumstances a narrow strip of land, but usually it means some form of boundary ridge.

The inescapable conclusion is that the field-name Hurrack Raine is taken from the dyke that is the field’s most identifiable feature and forms most of its eastern boundary. The slight contradiction to the published definitions of hurrack is that although the dyke is undoubtedly stony, there is nothing loose about it. If evidence from visible cross-sections of other parts of the dyke system is a guide, then it is a hard-packed mixture of clay and stone, which does at least conform to the definition of a heap and a confused mass, albeit in this case constructed with care to be extremely robust and permanent.

This post is related to an associated web site, and refers to the first entry on a page dedicated to recording some of the more interesting field-names of upper Swaledale. For more information on this first entry, and to click through to more on the Swaledale place-name project in general, visit here:https://willswales2.wordpress.com/fields/