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Thursday 3 February 2011

Costessey: The River Tud

Ab Cost seals 013

I’m researching the River Tud – and I’m not getting very far. I know it runs from roughly Dereham to its confluence with the Wensum at Hellesdon Mill. There’s some nice stuff about the old stately home of Costessey Hall being built on its banks – especially as that’s now the site of Costessey Park Golf Club. But where’s the source? Wikipedia says “south of Dereham”. My shiny new OS map of Dereham and Aylsham sort of agrees, with the line of blue running out somewhere closet to Spurn Farm. Meanwhile a book on Shipdham claims that it is the source for the Yare, the Wissey and the Tud, although it gives the vicinity for  the Tud rather vaguely as “near Thomas Bullock Primary School”.  Away from the source, where can I get a good photo of it, is there any sort of vista at Hockering or North Tuddenham for example? For the moment we’ll have to live with this view in winter sunlight taken between Longwater Lane in Costessey and the golf course. It’s a modest little river but I think it deserves more than the 200-odd words I’ve so far mustered.All info welcome.

3 comments:

  1. As obscure as it seems to many I find enquiries such as this fascinating.

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  2. Try this for hard-core "obscure"!

    http://riversidenorwich.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-river-tud-primary-sources.html

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  3. If I recall correctly, Costessey Manor, not far from the later Costessey Hall, had as its lord Earl Gyrth, Harold Godwinson's brother, but was later given to Count Alan Rufus, who in his time possessed the only Deer Park in Norfolk. Coincidentally, or not, in western Breton dialects, such as Kernev, the word "Tud" means "family, clan or people". In Leicestershire, where the various families of early post-Conquest Earls had Breton connections, the river Barwell (from the Anglo-Saxon for "Boar Stream") was in the medieval times renamed the "Tweed", a word of Welsh or Vannes (southern Breton) origin with the same meaning as "Tud".

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