This example is unusual because it contains a naming story that is almost contemporaneous, and very close to first hand. It illustrates how place names may be given through trivial incidents. Although this one did not survive into official records, such naming by landowners or those associated with them could easily transfer into and be perpetuated by paper records. It is also unusual as it occurs during a period when there were few uses of the phrase in literary works.

Without knowing more of the composition of the hunt participants it is difficult to say with ay confidence the source of phrase used as a place name. There are few other examples in the north. Of the literary works using the phrase the only one which remained popular through this period, and which may have a special attraction to rural readers was Isaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Although the phrase was adopted from an early edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, or another anthology it may simply have been a neologism, with no link to other usages.

Ord, R, The Sedgefield country in the seventies and eighties : with the reminiscences of a first whipper-in (1904), W. Dresser & Sons, (p.39-40) records the following anecdote in a chapter headed “In the Seventies and Eighties”, attribute to the then Hon. Secretary of the Hunt:

“One day when running below Embleton hounds pressed their fox very hard, and rattled him through the Whin House belt plantation, from which he broke away to the east, evidently beaten. Bevans, whose eye was as quick as an eagle, seeing that he was about done, made sure of a kill in the open a few fields further on. Still running fast into a whinny pasture, about half a mile from where Bevans viewed him, suddenly hounds threw up their heads, and hit off the line they could not. Thinking the fox had doubled back Claxon made a rather wide cast, when a loud ” holloa ” was heard from two men standing on the fence near to where the hounds had checked. Away we all galloped back, Bevans, as usual, foremost to view him out of the whin where the men were pointing to ; hounds dashed in, but not a whimper was heard, not a hound spoke, and after a good deal of whip cracking one of the men jumped into the whin, when out rushed an old Scotch ewe with scarcely a bit of wool on her. “Isn’t that the beggar you’re looking for,” said the man. Bevans’ round, ruddy, smiling face turned ashy pale, his countenance fell, and as he galloped away, there came forth from out of his inner-man unearthly sounds much resembling a young earthquake ; the nature and meaning of these rumblings we did not care to enquire. Bevans evidently thinking he had anathematised sufficiently the fellow who had sold us, got the hounds to-gether and we trotted away, not in the best of humours. From that day the whin has been called “The Beggar’s Bush.”

OED gives for whin; “common furze or gorse, also other prickly or thorny shrubs, as rest-harrow and buckthorn, also heather”.

Embleton is a village just inland from Dunstanburgh Castle. Whin House as a landholding can be traced back to the records of the Committee for Compounding with Delinquent Royalists in 1644, and appears in the 1841 Census. The location may now be Whinny Plantation, which is north of the village and lower. The parish also contains a Coldharbour and Spitalford, which are likely to be derogatory place names.

OS Grid

NU235225 ?