Masona
Attested: Masona at position 21 in the Ravenna Cosmography
Where: At or near Dartmouth, in south Devon, where the Comography's sequence runs Apaunaris – Masona – Alovergium.
Name origin: PIE *ma- ‘to wave, to signal’ (on page 693 of Pokorny's dictionary and not easy to hyperlink quickly) had descendants in Indic, Baltic, and Slavic languages, plus Greek μασσομαι ‘to seek, to pursue’, and may have contributed to several coastal signal-station place names, such as Maia. Here, in south Devon, it has gained the -ona ending commonly found on rivers, referring to the Dart estuary.
Notes: Prawle Point, the southernmost point of Devon, has a name from Old English for ‘lookout hill’, while nearby Start Point owes its name to Old English for ‘tail’. Compare Greek words that added S to the basic ma- and meant ‘whip’. People would not live on windy headlands, so settlements would have been in the nearest river valley. Totnes, at the inner end of the Dart estuary seems to have been important in early British history, causing the Historia Brittonum and Geoffrey of Monmouth to name it as the landing place for Brutus, whom they supposed to have founded Britain. Place-name dictionaries currently explain (unconvincingly) Tot- as derived from a personal name, but a Latin / Old English glossary from the 700s (see here) says Artura tot, where artura looks like a verbal noun from arto ‘to press together, to narrow down’. Dictionaries discuss toot-hill, from Old English totian ‘to peep out’, as if its semantic core was to look outwards, but maybe they should focus on a narrow viewing aperture instead.
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Last edited 15 September 2025. To main Menu