This unexpected term was brought to my attention by Jen in Edinburgh here, and I was flabbergasted enough to give it its own post. I knew the word headland, of course, but only as “A steep point of land projecting from a coastline into the sea or other expanse of water; a cape or promontory”; this is the OED’s sense 2, attested from ?c1475 (“Betwene the hedelonde and houndeclif fote, the cours is northwest and southest” in J. Gairdner, Sailing Directions 11), much later than sense 1, which goes back to OE:
1. Agriculture. (Each of) the strips of land at the end of a ploughed field, left for access and for convenience in turning the plough at the end of the furrows or near the border. In early use also: †a boundary formed by this; cf. headroom n. (obsolete).
In some districts the headland is left only at the two ends of the ridges or ‘lands’ (see land n.¹ 7), but in others it runs parallel to the fence round all sides of the field. It is typically ploughed last, with furrows parallel to the fence, crossing the ends of the regular furrows of the field at right angles.
In quot. OE¹ rendering the plural of classical Latin līmes (see limit n.), ult. reflecting Isidore Origines 15. 14. 2 (on field boundaries).OE Limites, hafudland.
Antwerp-London Glossary (2011) 85OE Of þam pytte andlang riþiges on þæt heafodlond; of þam heafodon andlang fura.
Bounds (Sawyer 587) in S. E. Kelly, Charters of Abingdon Abbey, Part 2 (2001) 294a1325 Un vileine vint e ma forer [glossed] In myn hevede lond [a1325 Arundel MS. heved-lond].
Glossary of Walter de Bibbesworth (Cambridge MS.) (1929) 319
[…]1573 Now plough vp thy hedlond, or delue it wᵗ spade.
T. Tusser, Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (new edition) f. 241637 There shalbe two Rod of hadland lying next to every mans particular meddow.
in Watertown (Massachusetts) Rec. (1894) 3
[…]1793 I see no account of the head lands being plowed at any place except River Farm.
G. Washington, Letter 4 August in Papers (2007) Presidential Series vol. XIII. 344
[…]1863 After the centre of the field has been ploughed, the headlands will remain to be ploughed separately.
H. Fawcett, Manual of Political Economy i. vi. 81
[…]2010 Our boots sank into the sludge and we slipped and slithered our way back to the safety of the headland.
R. Stirzaker, Out of Scientist’s Garden viii. 72
The etymology is boring (head n.¹ + land n.¹), but the Note is worth reading:
The word occurs frequently as a boundary marker in Anglo-Saxon charters; compare quot. OE² at sense 1. It also occurs as a field name in Middle English (e.g. Hefedlant, Gloucestershire (a1243), Longhadlond, Gloucestershire (13th cent.), The Havedlond, Tilehurst, Berkshire (1462), etc.), and such attestations are sometimes difficult to distinguish from lexical use of the word (in sense 1).
It has been suggested that the early surname John de Hevedlond (1275 in a Suffolk source) perhaps implies earlier currency of the word in sense 2.
As you can see from the 2010 citation, it’s still in use, and it astonishes me that I was completely unaware of it. Are you familiar with the ‘strip of land’ sense?
never seen it, but the all-knowing multitran uses it as the first meaning and suggests поворотная полоса as a translation. Which is also a meaning I never met (I would have thought that it is a highway’s turning lane, but a cursory search shows that both meanings of поворотная полоса exist).
Multitran also suggests that agricultural headlands exist not just in the plowed fields, but at the peripheries of vineyards too, and indeed, Google confirms this usage.
I first consciously came across it in one of the Cadfael books (where a body is discovered when the new owner of a field ploughs a bit further into the headland than was done before) – but I’ve definitely come across it since then, in the way that you do notice an odd thing once you’ve seen it once.
Yes, I’ll probably be seeing it all over the place now.
FWIW: a 2020 article in a field crops newsletter from Cornell, assessing the effects of such headlands on crop yields.
I knew headland, from archaeologists, and ridge and furrow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_and_furrow,
though not balk: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/balk#English.
And Edward Thomas’s conversation, I suppose on a headland: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57207/as-the-teams-head-brass.
It shows up when reading the history of ploughs, though I admit I probably wasn’t crystal clear on what it meant precisely there.
I know it’s the other, more usual, sense, but this reminded me.
In Pilgrimage, Dirty Dick had a couple of references to Ras-el-Tin, the promontory with the Lighthouse of Pharos, as “Headland of Figs,” which is more or less what Wikipedia says. But, later, he decided he was wrong and worked out ways to insert footnotes into both Goldmines of Midian (passing through Alexandria) and Arabian Nights (clay) to the effect that, no, it’s “Headland of Clay.” As well as revising the 3rd edition of the original.
I am not sure whether it’s more than راس التين vs. راس الطين.
After reading that ridge and furrow link and then watching a plough horse video, actual boustrophedon writing would be very difficult to read. It would not only go r-l then l-r. It would also wrap around the first line first bottom then top, till the set of lines was an appropriate height, and then you’d start a new set a certain distance below the first.
With a two horse plow, one was walking the previous furrow, about three inches below the other horse. With a one-horse plow, would the horse have one foot in the furrow. That seems awkward and maybe debilitating.
Checking another video, and no, the single horse is to the left of the row. In this video the plowman used a sort of zamboni pattern, not circling the same strip clockwise as stated in the ridge and furrow article, but turning into the edge of another strip ten feet over.
At A Potato Digging (Seamus Heaney)
I.
A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.
Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.
Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line from hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch
A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand
Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.
Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble towards the black
Mother. Processional stooping through the turf
Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.
—
I do not feel headland to be specific to Northern Ireland, although it would not be in my active vocabulary in this sense.
Absolutely — I grew up in a New Town planted in a rural part of North Hertfordshire, and used to play in the headlands of ploughed fields across the road in my grandparents’ village. Several of my friends started work as agricultural labourers, learning to plough with a tractor, and a lot of traditional vocabulary was still in use, lands, headlands, ins and outs, and all. Headlands have become part of the move to encourage biodiversity in farming in recent times, too.
OED doesn’t mention the (possibly Welsh) variation Addland, which is used in the title of a 2016 novel by Tom Bullough, Addlands
https://www.tombullough.com/addlands/
It got a brief review in the NYT “…patient and piercing novel… glints with ingenuity”
Boy, the reviewer is working hard to impress; here’s the second (and final) paragraph:
DE will have to weigh in on the Welsh dialect.
I suppose bwgan has no link to bogan, discussed elsewhere by our Southern Hemisphere contributors.
Oh, what does that mean? I’ve only encountered it in “knowing the ins and outs of some topic or practice” – it looks like that’s a metaphor…?
OED (entry revised 2021), s.v. in noun²:
I’m not sure if Mike Chisholm meant what I would call inbye (good pasture near the farm buildings) and outbye (rough hill grazing above the field boundaries).
Ah. Any agricultural uses of “windings or turnings in and out”?
No, just things like 1889 “He knew the ins and outs of the road better than any of us” (‘R. Boldrewood’, Robbery under Arms xxii). Mike Chisholm must be remembering a very local usage.
Not sure how local, but the ins and outs are AFAIR the names given to the turns at the end of each “land” (ploughed strip).
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nA65EOrQdk
Time to update OED?
“bwgan,” “mimmockin,” “pwntrel”
“Bwgan” and “pwntrel” are just yer actual Welsh, of course (“hobgoblin”, “dungcart.”) I have no idea what “mimmockin” means. I don’t believe I’ve ever mimmocked. Knowingly, at any rate. “Mimach” means “whimper.” Maybe it’s that.
Time to update OED?‘
Looks like it! Drop them a line.
Mimmockin is in A Glossary of Provincial Words used in Herefordshire – Google books may or may not take you to it here…
https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=biclEQAAQBAJ&q=mimmockin#v=snippet&q=mimmockin&f=false
‘an epithet applied to a puny weakly child’
As “a little mimmockin thing” — I love it!
“Looks like it! Drop them a line.”
I wonder if I’d have more luck convincing them than I seem to have had over the stonemason’s terms “batting / batted” (chiselled parallel grooves) and “dragged” (stone finished with a metal comb, or “drag”), both of very long standing, and both missing last time I checked (admittedly before I retired in 2014 and lost institutional access to the OED).
@Jen:
Thanks!
(I shall work it into my conversation at the first opportunity.)
[Haud yer mimach-ing, ye daft wee mimmockin!]