Dingesmere is a place known only from the

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

poem of the

Battle of Brunanburh The Battle of Brunanburh was fought in 937 between Æthelstan, King of Kingdom of England, England, and an alliance of Olaf Guthfrithson, King of Kingdom of Dublin, Dublin; Constantine II of Scotland, Constantine II, King of Scotland; and O ...

. The name is found in versions of the ''

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' is a collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the ''Chronicle'' was created late in the ninth century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of ...

'' from the year 937. Lines 53-56 of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (version A) read: :::''Gewitan him þa Norðmen nægledcnearrum,'' :::''dreorig daraða laf, on Dingesmere'' :::''ofer deop wæter Difelin secan,'' :::''eft Iraland, æwiscmode.'' (The B, C, D and W versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contain the variant spellings ''Dyngesmere'', ''Dingesmere'', ''Dynigesmere'' and ''Dinnesmere''.) These lines have been translated as: :::''Then the sorry remnant of the Norsemen, who had escaped the spears, set out upon the sea of Dinge in their nail-studded ships, making for Dublin over deep waters. Humiliated in spirit they returned to Ireland.'' As Dingesmere does not correspond to any known place-name its meaning has caused considerable controversy. Apart from “sea of Dinge”, suggestions have included: “dingy sea”; “sea of noise”; and “wetland of the Thing (assembly)”. One of the locations that has been cited is situated on the

Dee Estuary The Dee Estuary () is a large estuary by means of which the River Dee flows into Liverpool Bay. The estuary starts near Shotton after a five-mile (8 km) 'canalised' section and the river soon swells to be several miles wide forming t ...

Heswall Heswall () is a coastal town in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside, England. It was historically part of Cheshire and became part of Merseyside in 1974. It is located on the Wirral Peninsula. At the 2021 United Kingdom census, 202 ...

, Wirral. Another possible location is Lingham, on the

Irish Sea The Irish Sea is a body of water that separates the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. It is linked to the Celtic Sea in the south by St George's Channel and to the Inner Seas off the West Coast of Scotland in the north by the North Ch ...

coastline of Wirral at Moreton. In an article in ''

Notes and Queries ''Notes and Queries'', also styled ''Notes & Queries'', is a long-running quarterly scholarly journal that publishes short articles related to " English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism".From the inner ...

'' in 2022, Michael Deakin argues that such a wetland on the tenth-century Wirral coast of the Dee was unlikely. It has also been proposed that Dingesmere corresponds to Foulness Valley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which in Anglo-Saxon times would have been a wetland, or ''mere'', from the region of Holme-on-Spalding-Moor to the Humber estuary. The name ‘Foulness’ comes from the Old English ''fūle ēa'', meaning “dirty water”, because iron deposits in the water produced a brown discolouration; i.e. a ‘dung-coloured wetland’, or, in Old English, ‘dinges-mere’ (Old English ''ding'', dungClark Hall, J.R, 1960, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th ed., Cambridge University Press. + ''mere'', wetland).

References

10th century in England Anglo-Saxon settlements History of Cheshire Metropolitan Borough of Wirral {{England-hist-stub

See also

References