In earlier years I went on walking tours of the English Lake District.  I would stay in youth hostels, tramp the paths upward to Skiddaw or down to Grasmere, clamber over stiles set in drystone walls, read poetry, and allow myself to feel vaguely Wordsworthian (see dilapidated).  One learns a new landscape best from walking over it, but to some degree also from maps, and the much-folded little hiker’s map I carried introduced me to a wholly new topographic vocabulary.  “Gill” (narrow valley), “beck” (brook), “fell” (high barren hillside), “thwaite” (clearing), “gate” (way or street), “garth” (yard), “thorp” (village): all words from Old Norse, remnants of the time when the Lake District and the rest of northern England was settled by invading Vikings.  Their language influenced English throughout the island—such basic words as “they,” “die,” and “skirt” are from Old Norse—but it had a particularly important effect in the north.

The shepherd and writer James Rebanks has speculated that if a Viking could stand with him on a Lake District hillside, “he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year.”  Rebanks’s 2015 book The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape is an excellent introduction to contemporary Lake District farming and sheep-raising, especially its connections with the past (for Rebanks, these are part of family history, since he works the land once owned by his father and grandfather).  Several times The Shepherd’s Life uses the word “smit,” which refers to the colored mark made on a sheep to identify it as belonging to a particular farm:

Source: www.travels.toa.st

From generation to generation the Rebanks family smit has been blue ahead of red on the sheep’s shoulder.  As it happens, “smit” comes from Old English rather than Old Norse.  It’s cognate with the verb “smite” and thus conveys with Old Testamental directness a sense of physical action—colors not dripped but struck upon the animal’s back.  Once upon a time the word could signify a taint or blemish, a sullying stain, but now it survives only as a sheep-marking term and in the meaning “particle of soot,” being confused, possibly, with “smut.”

I like “smit” for its shortness and plainness, its simplicity of denotation, but indeed these are the qualities of several other laconic Northernisms which Rebanks drops into his text.  He does so casually, without any special fuss, since they are simply part of his linguistic heritage.  A “heaf” is a pasture ground.  A “dag” is a lock of wool “clotted with dirt about the hinder parts of a sheep,” as the OED delicately puts it.  A ram “tups” or mates with a ewe; four hundred years ago Shakespeare used the word in the vicious insult Iago directs toward Othello and Desdemona: “. . . an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.88-89).  “Graft,” slang for “hard work,” probably comes from an Old Norse word meaning “digging.” 

“Heaf,” “dag,” “tup,” “graft”: tough old monosyllables which tough people, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings both, struck as their smits on the land.