Return to a Drowned Landscape: Understanding the Place-Names of the Isles of Scilly

The visitor to the Isles of Scilly (IoS), an archipelago of five inhabited islands some twenty-five miles south-west of Land’s End, encounters intriguing place-names at every turn: islands called Bryher, Tresco, Samson and Arthur, bays called Wingletang and Pelistry, rocks called Biggal and Crim. Such names are not mere curiosities: they offer precious clues to the languages, history and culture of the islands across millennia. They provide the only evidence for the local use of the Cornish language, and they offer a distinctive insight into the nature of the English speech that replaced it from about the fifteenth century onwards. They point to contacts further afield, with Scandinavia, Brittany and perhaps Ireland; they allude to beliefs and stories; they record lost buildings and industries, changing flora, fauna and land-use. In this unique place they even offer an index against which to measure the sea-level rise that has made separate islands out of one land-mass within the span of human habitation. Our project, which revisits and develops material collected by Professor Charles Thomas for his 1985 award-winning study, Exploration of a Drowned Landscape, will for the first time publish a full record and discussion of Scilly’s place-names, combining systematic study of the documentary sources with comparative linguistic and onomastic analysis. The work will produce new insights into the linguistic history of an exceptional but often overlooked community, contributing to the study of both medieval Celtic language and modern English dialect. It will also supply an authoritative work of reference for researchers in many other fields. We shall involve scholars from a range of disciplines – history, archaeology, geography and environmental science, as well as linguistics and onomastics – to set the names fully in their context, and in addition to the survey we will publish a tightly focused case-study analysing the benefits of (and challenges to) co-ordinating disciplinary approaches to researching the past. Central to our work will be a programme of engagement with the community of the islands, both residents and visitors. Besides sharing our research with local audiences, we will draw on their knowledge of names, of explanations for them, and of local topography, to enrich our historical collection of documentary material. Our project is timed to coincide with the run-up to the 2026 opening of exciting new premises for an IoS Cultural Centre and Museum. We offer a distinctive strand in a range of activities which are planned to promote heritage in the islands, emphasising the vital part that heritage and culture play in the local tourist economy and the contribution that they make to education and to physical and mental well-being. The local school, the Five Islands Academy, is involved in a number of these activities, and is keen to partner with us in the delivery of our programme. An exhibition at the new museum and an accessible publication will present research results to a general audience. The islands’ rich and fascinating linguistic heritage currently enjoys little or no recognition – this project aims to change that.