Anglo-Saxon England was unusually warm and stormy. Place names coined then could hold clues to how the weather will get wetter and wilder as the climate changes

Island story: Muchelney in January 2014 SWNS/Alamy Stock Photo

IT’S blowy on the B4380 to Buildwas. A keen wind whipping across the floodplain from Shrewsbury flaps a misarranged saddle bag strap against my back wheel. As I cross the river Severn at Atcham, and bend right down the back road past Wroxeter, a black cloud delivers the first dribbles of rain.

England’s place names are a treasure trove of hidden history – if only we could find the key. Shrewsbury: recorded in the 10th century as Scrobbesbyrig, the name’s origin is as uncertain as its pronunciation today, but possibly means “the fortified place in the scrub”. Atcham: a contraction of Attingham, “the homestead of Eata’s children”, a puzzling reference to an obscure 7th-century saint from England’s far north. Wroxeter: origin disputed, but a rare Roman place name survival, as befits the site of what was Roman Britain’s fourth largest town. Buildwas: we’ll get to that.

In the title of one of her books, Margaret Gelling, the doyenne of English toponymists, called place names “signposts to the past”. I’m cycling the road to Buildwas because they could be signposts to the future, too.

I take refuge from the now intense, globular rain in the shadow of a large hedge on a bluff overlooking the floodplain just beyond Eyton – a homestead on a raised promontory – on Severn. Britain is a wet island, and it’s getting wetter. This is just a passing autumn shower, but as global temperatures rise, the paths of the most severe Atlantic storms are hitting the western shores of Britain and Ireland more frequently, oftenEngland’s soggy place names could …