Posted by RichardG on May 12, 2003 at 14:23:46 from 213.120.148.55 user RichardG.
In Reply to: Re: A Difficult Question! posted by Ed Kiser on May 10, 2003 at 21:43:05:
"Fells, beck, tarn, screes - all alien unknown words."
Fear not, Ed, those words are not just unknown to North Americans - as a native of the English Midlands they were just as alien to me when I first read S&A. However, by the time I dragged the family up to Windermere on holiday to see some of the AR places I had fathomed out their meanings and reckoned myself pretty well conversant with Lakeland terms and their meanings - at least those used by AR. I subsequently discovered that mynydd, nant, and llyn were the Welsh equivalents (North Wales is like Lakeland with smaller lakes) but have yet to learn the Welsh for screes. I guess "dale" would translate as "cwm" though. I am sure that other parts of the UK have their own expressions for similar natural phenomena.
You might recall that in GN the Swallows & Amazons make an effort - not always successfully - to refer to "burn" and "loch" when they instinctively want to say "beck" and "tarn".