Real Britain Company News…

We often tell potential visitors to Britain and Ireland that you do not have to travel far to find places of interest. Every town and village, and even the countryside, is steeped in history. These countries really are living museums!

Take our own village, Barford, in Warwickshire. It was mentioned in the Domesday Book, but goes back many years before this. The name derived from it’s position on the banks of the River Avon where the river is quite shallow. Hence it was the perfect place to ford the river with your load of barley, or other grain, to take to market at Warwick. ‘Barley Ford’ soon became shortened to Barford.

We have a web site dedicated to the heritage of Barford. I hope you find it as interesting as we do!

You can tell a lot about a history of a British town by the names of the streets. For instance:
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In researching the last blog entry on place names I used the Domesday Book web site. It dawned on me that many people, although they may have heard of it, may not know exactly what it is.
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The names of the towns and villages in the UK and Ireland were largely derived from their environment. You can often tell from the name the time period in which they were founded. For instance, ‘cester’, as in Gloucester, denotes a Roman settlement, usually the place of a fort. (Cester, by the way, is pronouced ‘ster’ so Gloucester is pronounced ‘Gloster’.)

Here are some more examples The Origins of Place Names

We receive many requests for itineraries that include various aspects of history, The Tudors (Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) perhaps being the most popular. One era which has largely been overlooked is that of the Anglo- Saxons, (more…)