“Port” names and Portways #2 (AW; J.A. Morris)

OLD ROADS IN ENGLAND.

Sir,—Regarding this matter, permit me to mention the inland City of Hereford. It was “Hereford Port” in Domesday Book, and within about a dozen miles in different directions I know of at least four “Portway” place-names on the way to the chief market of the district. They are now applied to places on roads, not (in this district) to lengths of road. Although the name is probably of Roman origin, I find in mapping out the straight-sighted prehistoric trackways in this district that they pass through the “Portway” spots, and these “ways,” like the Roman roads, probably evolved from much earlier tracks. We have a “Portcullis” place-name on an ancient road which here passed through a cutting in a bank. “Cullis” was an old English word for a cutting.

We have a local “Newport,” an ancient mansion. And just outside the walls of Hereford, adjacent to the sites of ancient gates, are “Portfields” in two different suburbs, common fields until a few centuries ago, the “port” here probably having a different shade of meaning.

I do not frivol when I explain that a “port” (applied to a town) did not need to have a harbour or walls, but was a trading centre of importance for imports and exports, to which goods were transported by porters along “portways.”—Yours truly,
Alfred Watkins.
  Hereford, November 14, 1922.

Sir,—The correspondence that has appeared in The Observer raises the question of the use of the word “port” in the names of walled and market towns, and appears to me to he founded on too narrow a conception of the meaning of the word. Portus may be best translated as a haven or resting-place, not necessarily near the sea or inland. The early application of the word “port” would be to such a place, whether on a main road or a terminus near the sea.

Mr. Anderson refers to the combination of the word in the town of Newport, Isle of Wight, which probably replaces an earlier haven near Carisbrook. He also mentions Newport, Shropshire. Until the twelfth century this town was known as Novo Burgo (New Borough), when it was changed to Newport. The origin of the arms, three fishes, is probably due to the fact that there was a large vivary near the town from which the burgesses were required to supply fish for the royal table.

Newport, in South Wales, reminds us of the decay of the earlier Roman town of Caerleon.

Port ways are not uncommon in the counties on the Welsh border: Hartshorne mentions five in Shropshire connected with places of Roman origin.

It may reasonably be suggested that a port way was a way leading to or from a stopping place upon one of the great Roman roads, which eventually developed into a town.

In the case of Newport, Shropshire, in Anglo-Saxon times this was a burgh, in Norman times the earlier word of Latin origin replaced it.
Yours faithfully,
J. A. Morris.
  The Priory, Port Hill, Shrewsbury.
    November 13, 1922.

[We cannot continue this correspondence. Ed. Observer.]