I saw a mention of a Boris Vian novel called Trouble dans les andains and was troubled by the fact that I had no idea what andains were. Wikipedia gave me an idea, with illustrations, and when I went to the English article I discovered that they were windrows. Ah (said I), now I not only know what andains are but I have a clearer idea of what windrows are! The OED (entry revised 2024) defines windrow thus:
1.a. A long line into which mown grass, hay, barley, etc., is raked before being gathered into heaps or cocks (cock n.³); a row of sheaves of corn, heaps of turf or peat, etc., set up to be dried by exposure to the wind. Also in extended use: a pile of dead branches, vegetation, etc., gathered to be burnt.
?1523 On the next day turne it agayne towarde night and make it in windrowes and than in small hey cockes.
J. Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry f. xv
[…]2. Originally and chiefly North American.
2.a. A long line or elongated pile of something, formed by the wind, resulting from other natural processes, or gathered together by human intervention; spec. (a) a row or pile of trees blown down by the wind (cf. windfall n. A.1a); (b) a long pile of leaves, dust, etc., heaped up by, or as if by, the wind.
1829 Here and there a wind-row, along which trees had been uprooted, by the furious blasts that sometimes sweep off acres of our trees in a minute.
J. F. Cooper, Wept of Wish Ton-Wish vol. I. ii. 28
[…]2.b. A long ridge of earth, gravel, etc., displaced by a grader or similar machine; esp. (chiefly Canadian) a ridge of snow heaped along the side of a road by a snowplough.
1907 The cross-town trolley-cars glided along between the windrows of the snow the big plow had whirled from the tracks.
Evening Mail (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 2 November 7/4
[…]
The etymology is boring (wind + row), but to make up for that the French one (from the above-linked Wikipedia article) is unexpected:
Latin ambitanus de ambire : aller des deux côtés (mouvement de la faux) : mesure équivalente à un pas, puis surface de céréale ou de fourrage abattue d’un coup de faux.
The Russian equivalent, валок, is a straightforward derivation from вал ‘rampart, dyke, wall.’
Incidentally, you may think, as I did, that the Fenimore Cooper novel quoted in the 1829 cite has a very odd title, and Wikipedia provides confirmation: “The title puzzled the public and did not satisfy them so it was only used in the United States.” It appears to mean ‘someone who was wept over’; from the novel: “The wept of my household is again with us.” He may have been wildly popular, but a competent wielder of the English language he was not.
For the other half of the title of Cooper’s novel, the internet gave me this 1978 explanation by a scholar with apparent relevant expertise:
“Captain Mark Heathcote, a widower now for more than twenty years, decides (for religious reasons never fully particularized) to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony and resettle in a fertile valley of the Connecticut Territory, not far from Fort Hartford. The new settlement is called Wish-Ton-Wish, a name which, the author claims, is the Indian term for whippoorwill. [Doubt has been cast on Cooper’s translation of the word, but this disagreement is unimportant here, for the name has no bearing on the action of the novel.]”
Other details suggest that it is the early-to-mid 1660’s when the plot really gets rolling although Cap’t Heathcote may have been in W-T-W for a while by then. (There’s a Mysterious Stranger who appears to be one of the fugitive regicides on the run from the agents of Charles II.)
BTW one notable thing about Connecticut place names is that while there are plenty of indigenous-language-origin hydronyms, such names are very rarely used for human municipalities. Rarely doesn’t mean never, and there are a few where e.g. rivers give their names to a settlement along their banks, but it still makes Cooper’s fictional toponym ring a little false.
Finally, fans of 1820’s fiction should know that the same historical actual/factual fugitive regicide whose somewhat mythologized life was drawn on by Cooper* was likewise reportedly drawn on by Sir W. Scott for at least a passing mention in his _Peveril of the Peak_. The internet says that PotP is Scott’s “longest novel,” which may not be a recommendation.
*This being Wm. Goffe, who for many years was hidden from the authorities by the king’s disloyal subjects in the Massachusetts town that is now Hatticville. Hat may or may not have had occasion to walk up Goffe Street in his New Haven days, but New Haven was in those days less remote from royal authority and viewed as less safe a place to hide long-term so he eventually went inland and further north.