Talk:Torpenhow Hill

Torpenhow Hill


There is no map in existence to my knowledge that identifies any such feature as "Torpenhow hill". In fact for the area, Torpenhow is in an unremarkably flat. Perpetuating this oft repeated but unexamined explanation should not be undertaken without at least a visit to the area and an examination of the local geography.


 * --anon.

How about Google maps? http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=54.740126,-3.234023&spn=0.025,0.025&t=m&q=54.740126,-3.234023

Looks like some one is doing the "Proof by reference to someones blog" thing.


 * And Google is better? Have you even looked at the map? There's no hill there. It's a ploughed field. The closest thing to a hill is a clump of trees between that point and the village. kwami (talk) 02:38, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Tautology myth


I disagree with the assertion that this means "Hill Hill Hill Hill". It's more to do with the lack of synonyms for kinds of hills and rock formations in English. Let's analyse it -


 * Tor - tor in Cornwall and Devon refers to a kind of odd rock formation, not to a hill. In Scottish Gaelic, it means a kind of heap, and while it can refer to a hill, doesn't have to.
 * Pen - simply means head, rather than hill specifically.
 * How - I'm not sure about this element, but it could either be haugr, the Norse for a mound ("Howe" in Lowland Scots), or an old form of the word for hollow. However, haugr could refer to the same formation as Tor, so if so, that's the tautology.
 * Hill - boring general purpose English word for a prominence of many different types.

So, my long winded translation would be "the Summit, with the tower/rock formation, with the mound, hill" --MacRusgail 12:16, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

I actually think it would be nice if in a few hundred years, it would be called "Torpenhowhill Mountain" or replace 'mountain' with whatever your imagination can give ya... (89.138.203.102 (talk) 12:48, 7 January 2008 (UTC))


 * Tor - From Celtic origin meaning 'conical hill'
 * Penn - From Breton/Old English but could be from Anglo-Saxon
 * Pen - A fold, again;Breton
 * How - I struggled with this myself & pretty sure that it from the same orgin as Pen..

The British Isles have been invaded and ruled by many differant settlers with differant dialects;I do accept that TOR PEN HOW all have differant orgins,altho Scottish Gaelic & Cornish does have some connection with Celts. Letters do get dropped & added to word ie Ton became Town. I'll stick with the Hillhillhill Hill meaning...It's alot safer. J.Britton —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.48.51.223 (talk) 19:19, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Nice idea mate, but "Hillhillhill Hill" is a load of rubbish. But don't let facts get in the way of a good story. 91.85.188.43 (talk) 09:18, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * If the origin of "how" is norse, it could also mean a pagan place of worship. Torshov, an area of Oslo, Norway, is named after an ancient temple dedicated to Thor. Geira (talk) 13:56, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Doubt has been cast on this story. See "The debunking of Torpenhow Hill", by Darryl Francis, in Word Ways, Feb. 2003. The beginning of the article, quoted from here:
 * In his second book, Beyond Language (1967), Dmitri Borgmann posed a problem and offered a solution that have both gone unremarked until now, over 35 years later. For those who don't have the book, here is part of Problem 35. Etymological Eccentricities:
 * Find a word or name that exhibits a pure, quadruple redundancy, consisting of four elements identical in meaning.
 * The resolution provided by Borgmann runs as follows:
 * In The Story of English, Mario Pei mentions a ridge near Plymouth, England, called TORPENHOW HILL. This name consists of the Saxon TOR, the Celtic PEN, the Scandinavian HAUGR (later transposed into HOW), and the Middle English HILL, all four of them meaning "hill". Hence, the modern name of the ridge is actually "Hillhillhill Hill"!


 * The Catalyst


 * On a recent holiday in the English county of Cumbria (part of which used to be called Cumberland), I noticed the name Torpenhow on a road sign. As I was 400 miles from Plymouth (which is in the English county of Devon), I wondered if this was another Torpenhow, different from the one mentioned in Dmitri's book. I detoured through the small but unremarkable village of Torpenhow. No sign of any local feature that could conceivably be Torpenhow Hill.


 * On returning home, I started to do some checking on the Internet and in my local library. I concluded that there was no such place or geographical feature as Torpenhow Hill, and that this is a fiction that has been repeated and re-repeated many times...

(end of quote) -- Thnidu (talk) 18:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
 * As I say above, the meaning of each of the words is quite different. "How" means a mound, and "pen" means a head. Not the same at all...--MacRusgail (talk) 22:47, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

I was in the area recently myself. It is rolling countryside there, no big hills. The Lake District can be seen in the distance but it is not part of it.--MacRusgail (talk) 20:37, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

The tale refers to a hill, not a village.

Thus the hill of concern may in fact have nothing to do with the village as sign posted. These old dialects never had an "Official One True" spelling, thus odds on the spelling may vary markedly between sources. ie. Looking for the exact word "Torpenhow" may not help you.

The veracity of the tale does not rest on whether it appears on an official map or not. All that is required is that the originator of the tale met some folk who regarded an entity name as been torpenhow hill.

After all, how did the names _ever_ appear on a map? Some surveyor at some point in history asked a local, "What do you call that feature over there?" So in what way is that "Truer" than the linguist chatting to a local? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.37.96.11 (talk) 03:13, 24 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I suspect that the first element is not a Brittonic 'tor' meaning hill but rather a Brittonic 'tre' meaning farm, which you will find in Wales and Cornwall as well as in Cumbric. Pennoc may be a man's name. There is a Gospatric Map Bennock from Carlatten in the 12th Century and Pennoc may be a version of that if it was a Cumbric personal name.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.176.105.6 (talk) 14:51, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

This is beside the point, the thing is notable because it was used as an example meaning "hill-hill-hill hill", as in the examples cited. Yes it would not be a precise tautology even if the name existed. The "debunking" concerns only the final "Hill", so the "triple" tautology would still stand; but yes, modern reference works do not consider the "tor+pen" part a tautology, just the "how" part. This is worth pointing out, but the entire point of this article, for whatever it is worth, is the occasional use of the "hill-hill-hill hill" idea when discussing loanword etymologies. --dab (𒁳) 18:45, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

The English Place Name Survey posits that the elements of the name are not actually from three different languages. I don't know how to quote, but it says:

"The first element is the British torr, 'peak.' This would seem to have been compounded with British pen , Torpen then denoting 'peak-head.' To this was added in Anglian days the English hōh , dat. sg. hō (h )e , giving forms Torpenho and the like. A similar combination of penn and hōh is probably found in Pinhoe (PN D 443), c. 1050 Peonho.

The old story, first told by Denton (51), that the name bears witness to three successive races—British (Pen ), Saxon (Tor ), Danish (How ) is incorrect; torr, though occasionally found in OE , is really a loanword from British, and torpen may well be pure British. The added how, to judge by early forms in -oc and -oh , would seem to be from English hōh rather than ON haugr."

http://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/id/532847f8b47fc408f900103f Musical lottie (talk) 21:50, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

Comment (moved from page)
However, note that this is disputed. See http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+debunking+of+Torpenhow+Hill-a098250320 for example, and also note that the OS map of the area labels the hill at the given grid reference as Brown Moor, not Torpenhow Hill. - User:195.212.29.92

1794 ref
found this 1878 ref to a ca. 1794 citation:, but I cannot find the quote in Hutchinson (I am perhaps looking in the wrong volume, as the page does not exist). Anyway, the exact wording would appear to be relevant here: Hutchinson is not reported to have said the name means exactly "HillHillHill Hill", and gives other possible etymologies, so this would appear to be a case of the best story winning out. Moreover, we do need to cite whether this is a parish that has a rise nearby which one could imagine is called T. Hill, or whether there really is a traditional T. Hill apart from this story. kwami (talk) 07:27, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

That is significant. I'm bothered by the current tone of the page which seems to regard the hill as a total myth, based on it's absence in any gazetteer. No gazetteer can be totally comprehensive. Lack of a gazetteer entry for Torpenhow Hill doesn't prove it's nonexistence. Names may fall out of use over time, and names which were around prior to gazetteers may have vanished before ever being recorded. An 1878 reference to Torpenhow Hill is important (and a 1794 reference would be even better). We can't necessarily identify a particular point on the landscape as Torpenhow Hill now, but it does seem that there was a point with that name at one time.192.104.39.2 (talk) 17:14, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Really bad
This page is really bad. I removed the introduction saying "Torpenhow Hill is at ", but really, it should be rewritten and we need some references. Jalwikip (talk) 20:14, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Plymouth
No mention of the supposed Torpenhow Hill near Plymouth, with its supposed Cornish input? It's the one (if there is one) that springs to mind down this end of the country. Totnesmartin (talk) 13:09, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm wondering the same. Mario Pei, whom Francis identifies as the originator of the factoid, also refers to a geographical feature (which he calls a ridge, to be precise) near Plymouth, not in Cumbria. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:46, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Torpantau
I noted the place name "Torpantau" on a modern Ordinance Survey map in the Brecon Beacons.

See the name applied to the slope north of the location of this former railway station:

Torpantau railway station

The spelling of the name is unchanged in the analogous 1800's map.

I'm not saying that Torpantau means hill-hill-hill, I'm just saying that it's an alternate location, in Wales, that sounds similar and could have contributed to the story.

Maybe a Welsh-speaker could suggest a translation.
 * I'm very much a learner, quite limited so far. Tor, I assume, is "Rocky, steep, hill". I'm pretty sure "tor" comes from the Old Welsh "twr" (and therefore Cumbric and Cornish). "Pantau" to this beginner's eye may be the plural of "pant". Pant (to me) generally refers to a small stream ; think a brook in a dip. So "pantau" might mean "very small valleys, probably with streams". Mongoletsi (talk) 16:02, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Another reference
video by Tom Scott https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo&feature=youtu.be 202.7.248.39 (talk) 05:58, 8 April 2023 (UTC)