A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
wonty-tump
A wonty-tump is a molehill. The word is West Country and Welsh Marches dialect, made of two ordinary local words: a wont or want is a mole, and a tump is a small mound or hillock. It survives in field names and in the speech of older people in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and the neighboring counties.
Etymology
Both halves are old. The mole word is a worn-down Old English term for the animal, and the mound word is of uncertain origin but has been used for everything from a molehill to a burial mound to a clump of trees on a rise. English collected a considerable number of dialect names for the mole and its workings, including moldiwarp, which means, precisely, earth-thrower.
Notes
Molehill soil is the finest and most workable earth in a field, brought up from below the turf and free of stones and seed, and gardeners have collected it for potting for centuries. Archaeologists and field surveyors read molehills too, since a mole working over a buried site brings up pottery, tile, and bone from a depth nobody has to dig to.