Roddon

A roddon, also written as rodham, roddam or rodden, is the dried raised bed of a watercourse such as a river or tidal-creek, especially in the Fen district of East Anglia in England. Such raised silt and clay-filled beds are ideal for settlement in the less firm peat of The Fens. Many writers have followed the archaeologist Major Gordon Fowler's preference for the word roddon to define such structures though modern researchers suggest the word rodham is the more correct local word.

Oak preserved in peat through which roddons passed has been dated to around 4000 years before present (BP). The origin of the raised nature of a roddon is debated; some writers suggest this is due to a silt build-up during marine incursion. Another explanation (and the one most favoured today) is based on the greater shrinkage of peat, compared to that of silt. This theory suggests that the surrounding peat lands have subsided more than the silt-filled banks of the roddon, leaving the banks raised above the general level of the area.

The term roddon may be a corruption of the now rare rodham, which meant "near a river where osiers grow", with particular reference to the River Thames; an osier is a willow used in basket-making.

Archaeologist Bob Silvester suggests that the term roddon is more popular among local writers such as Fowler (1932), Darby (1940), Phillips (1970), and Harry Godwin (1978), though rodham is acknowledged by Godwin. Silvester notes that Astbury (1958) and e.g. Seale (1975) Soil survey of Cambridgeshire preferred the term rodham.Roddam is used by Egar (1897) and also by Skertchly (1877); in Skertchly's case, as a local term "used only in the Isle of Ely". The Oxford English Dictionary quotes an even earlier written source of roddam as Wright (1857). Toponymist Richard Coates (2005) agrees that whilst roddon is now the normal geographical term, the older form, –(h)am, rejected by Fowler, was in fact the correct local term, and writers who followed Fowler are wrong. Astbury goes further, quoting Clarke (1852) discussing "veins of silt" as silted-up creeks, which Astbury claims are rodhams, though Clarke does not use that term.

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