HEXHAM publishing legend Stan Beckensall is back on bookshop shelves again, this time thanks to a foray into the place names of Northumberland.

With 40plus publications already to his name, he thought he'd give it one more whirl - he says it's his last - before finally putting down his pen.

The octogenarian said: "I've given up my car now, so getting out and about is much harder nowadays, but there's also the sheer amount of hard work that goes into these things - people don't appreciate how much research goes into each book."

Rather than start from scratch, this time round Stan has dusted down an old favourite and refreshed Place Names and Field Names of Northumberland ready for republication.

His work for this particular book actually started in the 1970s, when he was a tutor at Alnwick College of Education, then located within the grounds of Alnwick Castle.

"It was announced the college was going to be closed and by 1977 it was getting depressing because students were going out, but none were coming in," he said.

"I had more time on my hands as a result and the Duke (of Northumberland), who was very supportive, gave me access to his photographic archives of prehistoric artefacts.

"When I also expressed an interest in field names, he told me he had these surveys that had been done in 1620 by one Thomas Norton.

"The Northumberland Estates office has all these maps from different periods - including tithe maps from the 1820s - which when I put them together gave me the opportunity to see how the field names had changed over the centuries."

While place names were well recorded, the myriad of names often attributed to the fields on each farm were much harder to establish, he said - they weren't often recorded in writing, or at least not in modern times.

However, by pouring over old maps, using linguistic records of the Northumbrian dialect and actually going out to talk to farmers, he has succeeded in retrieving the names once lost in the mists of time.

Stan said: "We wouldn't know much about the people who settled here in Anglo-Saxon times if it wasn't for some of those names - elements of their names are incorporated into ours' nowadays.

"And names can tell us a lot about ordinary people living on the farms, too, and about the condition of the land they worked.

"Moralees meant 'a marshy place', Berwick, such as in Berwick-on-Tweed, came from 'Berewich', which meant 'barley farm', and Bewick came from the old English 'beo wic' - 'beo' meaning bee, so 'bee farm'."

Modern names were often ironic or an outright joke. He'd come across fields named Jill's Arse, Klondike (a fertile tract the source of one hopeful farmer's wealth?) and March Brown, christened in honour of one farmer's friend who enjoyed nothing more than a walk through the fields when he visited, but there was nothing leisurely about the pursuit. He marched everywhere.

Derivations of some local names:

Slaley = 'claggy' or muddy stretch of 'ley', cleared land

Blanchland = drawn from the French canons who once lived and worked in the Abbey there, distinguished by their white habits

Acomb = 'acum', which identified a location 'at the oak trees'

Sillywrae = 'salix', meaning willows, and wrae, meaning nook

Bellister = bel-estre, meaning fine place

Broomhaugh = a broom-covered haugh, a flat piece of alluvial plain

Brunton = 'burna', meaning 'by the burn', and ton, meaning 'settlement'

Dissington = 'dic' meant ditch, moat or embankment, so 'the settlement by the ditch'

Falstone = 'fealu' ('yellowish') or 'fag' (multi-coloured) and 'stan', meaning 'stone'

Haltwhistle = from 'heafod', the place, where the river/s either forked or joined, 'twisla'

Haydon Bridge = from 'hay-don', hay valley

Heddon-on-the-Wall = from 'hed-dun', heather hill

Horsley = from 'horsa-leah', horse pasture

Kielder = pre-Roman, like the Welsh 'caled-dwfr', violent water

Lambley = lambs' leah or leya, ie. pasture

Langley = a long clearing clearing

Melkridge = from 'meoluc-hryg', milk ridge, ie. good pasture

Ponteland = from 'ealand', an island in the marsh by the River Pont

Riding Mill = mill in a clearing

Stamfordham = settlement at the stony ford

Stocksfield = field belonging to a religious house or outlying settlement

Wallington = W(e)alh's people's settlement

Willimoteswike = French, Willimot's farm

Wylam = from 'wil', a mechanical device that could be a fish trap or a water mill, on a 'hamm', a water meadow