THE VILLAGE of South Otterington on the A167 past Northallerton has a name in two parts.

Working backwards we have ton an antique English word embedded in hundreds of English placenames – think Darlington or Brighton. Ton meant, in the seventh or eighth centuries when many such placenames were coined, ‘settlement’.

Indeed, our word ‘town’ comes from ton, though the tons back in the early Middle Ages would rarely have had more than 20 or 30 souls in them. Ottering, instead, was a Dark Age name for the Wiske that runs by the modern village. But what did Ottering mean?

Well, Ottering meant simply the Otter Stream. Otters were widespread over the whole of our island in the centuries when the Otter Stream Settlement was founded and were evidently especially common hereabouts.

Their meat was not a particular favourite – though it was eaten at Lent by Christians who claimed that the otter was a fish not an animal.

However, its fur was treasured and a poor peasant family who stumbled on an otter’s holt could pay for a month’s food with a single kill. It was perhaps as a result of over-enthusiastic hunting that the Otter Stream became the Wiske or, as we would say, the Marshy Stream: there were no otters left in it.

Certainly, the otter was hunted to extinction in our region. Indeed, it is only in the last 30 years that the otter has sneaked back into this part of the north in impressive numbers.

And it is only in the last decade that the Wiske is once again able to play host to the animal that inspired its earliest recorded name.