Britain's disappearing words celebrated, from 'shreep' to 'sun-scald'

A new exhibition at Wordsworth House is trying to keep alive some of the rural idioms which are fast-disappearing.

The Lake District - John Macfarlane
(Image credit: The Lake District - John Macfarlane)

A new photography exhibition at the childhood home of Lake District poet William Wordsworth celebrates the dying dialect of Britain’s landscape.

‘The Word-Hoard: Love letters to Our Land’ has been curated by award-winning nature writer Robert Macfarlane. It follows his 2015 bestseller Landmarks, which explored the regional dialect words connected to nature, terrain and weather, and brings together 25 dramatic photographs by his parents, Rosamund and John Macfarlane – including the gorgeous image at the top of this page.

The words in Mr Macfarlane’s vocabulary include 'shreep', an East Anglian word for mist clearing slowly, and 'sun-scald', a Sussex word for a patch of bright sunlight on water.

The exhibition runs until September 3 at Wordsworth House in Cockermouth - find more information here.

Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.