A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words 1190 entries

bankside

BANK-side
The sloping ground along the edge of a river or lake, and the band of life that occupies it — alder and willow leaning out, reeds, undercut root mats, the shade that keeps the water cool and the fallen wood that slows it down. Ecologists and anglers use it as an adjective more than a noun: bankside trees, bankside cover, bankside vegetation.
Etymology
A plain English compound of bank — from a Scandinavian source, the same word as bench, a raised shelf — and side, Old English sīde. What makes it worth a word is that the common noun hardened into a proper one. The stretch of the Thames’s south shore in Southwark is recorded in 1554 as the Banke syde, meaning nothing grander than the street along the bank, and that ordinary description became the name of the ground where the Globe, the Rose, the Swan, and the Hope playhouses all stood.
Notes
Bankside is where a river does most of its work on land and land does most of its work on the river. Kingfishers and sand martins need a cut bank to nest in at all, and the whole nesting system depends on the river being allowed to undercut its own edge.
human settlement Old English river water
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