The Wansdyke & District Forums

A question I am asked on every walk and answer differently depending on my mood, so let me put it to the people who actually know. Where does the name come from? The old folk hereabouts, my grandmother's age, would tell you the Devil dug it in a single night, threw up that great bank with one cast of his spade, which is what they said of any earthwork too big to credit a man with. But I have also heard it was Woden's work, the god's, and that the Devil only crept in later when the god was forgotten. Which is the older telling?

The name itself is not in much doubt, and it is the god, not the Devil. It is recorded as Wodnes dic in a charter of 903, Woden's dyke, the boundary set to the chief of the old gods. The Devil arrives later and by a familiar road: the Church spent centuries turning the old gods into devils, and a work too vast to be thought human is exactly the sort of thing that gets handed to whichever supernatural builder is in fashion. So the answer, Bran, is that both are folk explanations for a thing nobody remembered the building of, and the god is merely the elder of the two. The dyke is in fact a post-Roman boundary work; but that is the dull answer, and nobody ever wanted it. E.S.

And yet how telling, that they reached for a god, and then a devil, rather than for men with spades. The people who named it knew, in the way the old knowing goes, that it marked a boundary that mattered, a line between one thing and another, and a line like that asks more than a labour gang to account for it. They were not wrong about the weight of it. Only about the hand.

its a saxon boundary ditch morwenna, men with spades and a lot of em, marking whose land was whose, same as a hedge only bigger. no god no devil no weight. mind you ill grant you nobody digs a hedge that size for a field boundary, so there was summat they meant by it. but it was politics not magic. usually is.