Distant Horizons: California, Siberia and Manitoba

There is a class of field-names which use transferred names to express something about the land to which they refer. These are different to commemorative names, like the Crimean War ones discussed in a previous post, which tend to have no relationship to the characteristics of the fields they refer to. A fairly common name of this type is California, which A New Dictionary of English Field-Names (ANDEFN) notes is used to refer to ‘remote land’. This is certainly the case with fields of the this name that I’ve seen in Dumfries and Galloway. We have collected 2 Californias in South Ronaldsay, and I imagine we’ll get at least one more as the modern OS has a California Hillside which was just Hillside on earlier maps.

Another potential meaning suggested by ANDEFN is a reference to the California gold rush of 1848–1855, suggesting productive land. And as field-names are often named ironically, we might also suspect that California could refer to land which promised much but returned little. If you have a field named California on your farm, it would be really interesting to hear what meanings are associated with the name.

We’ve just heard via the Facebook group of a “rather bleak piece of heather” in Egilsay called Siberia. As far as I’m aware, this is the only Siberia in Scotland. ANDEFN records a Siberia Nursery in Derbyshire whose name alludes “to the remoteness (and perhaps a prevailing chilliness) of the field.” It will be interesting to see how far the Egilsay Siberia is from the farm.

A field-name currently unique to Orkney is Manitoba. We have 4 fields which feature this name, all derived from an area of land called Manitoba: 1st Field of Manitoba; 2nd Field of Manitoba; Manitoba - Field with the Water Supply in it; and Old Silage Field - Manitoba. There’s another in Harray and I wouldn’t be surprised if more come to light. With Orkney’s close ties to Manitoba - a good overview of which is given in the Canadian Encylopedia’s article on Orkneymen - it’s unsurprising that the province made its way into the names of the fields here. The null hypothesis for names of this type is that they refer to distance form the farm, and the Harray Manitoba is certainly set apart from the other fields. And as with California we might imagine other, more specific, motivations: opportunity, hardship and toil, cold.

Fortunately, we have additional information about the Manitobas in Harray and South Ronaldsay. A footnote to the field-names section in Harray: Orkney’s Inland Parish tells us that “kinsmen in Canada [were] breaking ground at the same time”.¹ Remarkably, Alexander Annal tells a similar story about the South Ronaldsay Manitoba: “at the time they were cutting out new fields in Manitoba, my Manitoba was being developed here on the farm.” There’s far more to the tale of the South Ronaldsay Manitboa - including four Irish navvies stranded in Wick - which deserves a post of its own.

For now it’s worth noting that not only is Manitoba a field-name unique to Orkney but one tied to a specific time and experience: creating new fields at home while the same was happening three thousand miles across the Atlantic.