Base Brown NY224112 - a craggy mountain near Seathwaite in the Lake District.
PNCu p353 lists earlier forms as Bess Broun 1774, and a surname or by-name in Basbroun from 1332. They do not attempt an explanation. Diana Whaley wonders tenatively if it is from Bruni's Cowshed ON báss Brúni, but with Celtic syntax - an inversion compound. She finds this an unlikely name for a mountain (Whaley 2006) . Also unlikely is a name from a surname but it does happen, as in the mountain Robinson.
I note the mountain name Baosbheinn NG865665 in the Highlands. Drummond mentions the traditional derivation this from baobh a Gaelic word spirit, witch and sometimes wizard, but he cites a local source who said it was bathais bheinn "forehead mountain" and thinks this is most likely (Drummond, 2007). I'm not sure this helps with Base Brown, to have a Gaelic element here is less likely than English, Norse or Cumbric, and it should be *Bathes Brown as the /θ/ should remain in an early borrowing (unlike the Highland one where the /θ/ would have gone around 1300).
Alan James discusses the Cumbric bronn "a breast" but used of rounded hills. However the forms for Base Brown all seem to have a long vowel in /u:/
There is the Welsh hill name - Berwyn, from bar + wyn "white summit", usually referring to snow. I think the Brown might be Cumbric barr + wïnn, /barwin -> brawin/ via metathesis, very common with the liquid /r/.
That leaves the more difficult Bas- possibly Bes-. There is a word beis in Welsh with the GPC gives as "bottom, ford, shallows, flats, a wading, fording [place]". The grammatically possible Beis Barwyn "fording place by the white topped summit" makes little sense as Base Brown is in fact the summit.
And then there's Baysbrown, NY312048 a farm in Langdale, just on the valley edge where it rises up steeply from the flat bottom. It was Basebrun 1216 - 72. It stands near a stream called Baysbrown Pool - from the Cumbric poll "stream". I presume that Baysbrown is pronounced as per local dialect as /bε:sbru:n/ and as such would descend from ON báss Brúni as Diana Whaley suggests - Brúni's cowshed (Whaley, 2006: p20). It has Celtic word-order. I just wonder why designate Brúni's cowshed alone rather than the rest of the farm. In fact, the long-houses used by the Vikings had beasts and people in the same building, so there usually would be no separate cowshed at this time (Jennings, 2003).
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I note the mountain name Baosbheinn NG865665 in the Highlands. Drummond mentions the traditional derivation this from baobh a Gaelic word spirit, witch and sometimes wizard, but he cites a local source who said it was bathais bheinn "forehead mountain" and thinks this is most likely (Drummond, 2007). I'm not sure this helps with Base Brown, to have a Gaelic element here is less likely than English, Norse or Cumbric, and it should be *Bathes Brown as the /θ/ should remain in an early borrowing (unlike the Highland one where the /θ/ would have gone around 1300).
Alan James discusses the Cumbric bronn "a breast" but used of rounded hills. However the forms for Base Brown all seem to have a long vowel in /u:/
There is the Welsh hill name - Berwyn, from bar + wyn "white summit", usually referring to snow. I think the Brown might be Cumbric barr + wïnn, /barwin -> brawin/ via metathesis, very common with the liquid /r/.
That leaves the more difficult Bas- possibly Bes-. There is a word beis in Welsh with the GPC gives as "bottom, ford, shallows, flats, a wading, fording [place]". The grammatically possible Beis Barwyn "fording place by the white topped summit" makes little sense as Base Brown is in fact the summit.
And then there's Baysbrown, NY312048 a farm in Langdale, just on the valley edge where it rises up steeply from the flat bottom. It was Basebrun 1216 - 72. It stands near a stream called Baysbrown Pool - from the Cumbric poll "stream". I presume that Baysbrown is pronounced as per local dialect as /bε:sbru:n/ and as such would descend from ON báss Brúni as Diana Whaley suggests - Brúni's cowshed (Whaley, 2006: p20). It has Celtic word-order. I just wonder why designate Brúni's cowshed alone rather than the rest of the farm. In fact, the long-houses used by the Vikings had beasts and people in the same building, so there usually would be no separate cowshed at this time (Jennings, 2003).
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