TODAY is the feast of St John of Beverley, one of our lesser known English saints, who has the unusual benefit of having two feast days in his honour. The other is on May 7, but it seems today is the official one.

John was born in AD 640 at Harpham in the East Riding between Bridlington and Driffield and entered Whitby Abbey as a pupil of St Hilda.

In AD 687 he became Bishop of Hexham and is renowned because it was he who ordained the remarkable Venerable Bede.

John retired to Beverley and died there. The present Minster, now used by the Church of England, is a successor to his earlier church.

St John's tomb is marked by a slab in the floor of the nave where he lies with the rosary he used during his work as a Roman Catholic priest.

One of the relics of his period is St John's Well at Harpham which can still be seen.

It is one of two famous wells in the village, and in this case it was said the water would cure sick cattle and would also calm the most dangerous of bulls. When I called to inspect it, the summer was hot and dry, but this ancient well was still flowing. It is surrounded by metal railings and bears a stone cupola. The name "St John's Well" is carved on the stonework.

I can find no piece of weather wisdom for today, although Monday, October 28, is the feast of St Jude and St Simon when ancient lore said it was sure to rain.

For that reason, teams of oxen at work on the farms were given the day off!

A visitor to our region told me she was puzzled by the terminology used to describe geographical features of the countryside.

She explained that one of her difficulties was understanding the difference between a dale head and dale end as they are applied to the smaller valleys of the North York Moors.

Whether these dual terms are restricted to the smaller dales of the North York Moors is something about which I cannot be certain, but they don't appear to be in common use in the Yorkshire Dales or the Durham hills. Nonetheless, these words do crop up in some of those areas.

Both terms are common in Eskdale. Great Fryup Head and Fryup End, Glaisdale Head and Glaisdale End, Danby Head and Danby End are examples, with a central portion of Fryup being known simply as The Heads.

In some cases, farms or other houses bear these names - for example, Dale Head, Wood Head and Grange Head - while near Goathland there is Fair Head Lane, Hazel Head Farm, Green End and Dale End Farm.

Head is a common Yorkshire term which indicates a high point in the landscape - Flamborough Head and Boulby Head are examples along the coast - but the term is also found in County Durham, eg Wear Head and Allen Head. There is also a Greenhead beyond Haltwhistle in Northumberland.

Almost without exception it means a lofty place, and in Yorkshire it refers to the highest point of a dale, this often being known simply as Dale Head without the relevant name as a prefix.

The name "end" refers to the lower part of the dale, the opposite end to the head in fact - Glaisdale End is the lower part of that dale as well as being the location of the village and the point where Glaisdale Beck joins the larger Esk, and a similar logic applies to other areas.

Fryup End is marked by a farm of that name and it stands close to a point where Great Fryup Beck also joins the Esk. It marks the end of that particular dale, in other words.

There are also instances of these names in the Yorkshire Dales. High in Littondale there is Cosh Beck Head, Walden Head lies above West Burton, while Walden Beck flows from the hills to join the Ure in Wensleydale just below Aysgarth Falls.

Nearby Bishopdale boasts both a Dale Head and a Bishopdale Head, and the heights of Coverdale are marked by Coverhead Farm. Askrigg has its West End, while West Burton boasts a Town Head.

Swaledale also boasts one or two heads, such as Dale Head and Gale Head in Arkengarthdale, with Drygill Head not far away near Tan Hill, this being at the head of Dry Gill which flows into other streams before joining the River Greta in County Durham.

I am sure there are more. It seems, however, that in the Yorkshire Dales generally, or in the dales of County Durham, the term is not so commonly used to denote the highest point of a dale, large or small, although old travel books sometimes refer to the heads of Swaledale and Wensleydale.

In both Durham and the Dales, however, the term "end" does not appear to refer to the lower part of a minor dale.

In parts of North Yorkshire, however, the word head appears in headrigg which is, or used to be, the headland of a field.

This was the last part of a field to be ploughed and it ran at right angles to the furrows.

Head was also used to indicate the summit of a railway incline and most of us are familiar with Garsdale Head, that remarkable railway station high on the Pennines between Cumbria and Yorkshire.

Continuing the topic of north-eastern terms, my recent notes about the suffix holm or holme on village names (D&S, Sept 27) have resulted in a call from a correspondent in Voss, Norway.

He refers to the strong Swedish links with the word holm, referring to Stockholm in particular but also mentioning that holm, in both Norway and Sweden, also means an island.

Our local method of pronunciation of holm, ie um as in Moorsum for Moorsholm, has also strong links with the ancient grammar of Sweden.

There is also a town called Holm on the west coast of Norway which, from my map, appears to be built on an island, or a piece of land which is almost surrounded by water.

The scale of my map, and the markings upon it, are too indistinct for me to be certain.

The term can also mean a large rock and he tells of a ship which, some two years ago, collided with a huge rock, a holm, in the harbour of Haugesund between Bergen and Stavanger.

Incidentally, I spotted a place called Uskedal just inland from Haugesund (so like our own Eskdale), while off the coast of Sweden there is an island called Gotland, pronounced like Goathland, a village on the North York Moors.

The similarities between our northern words and the Scandinavian tongues continue to provide remarkable examples, being further evidence of the Viking invaders.

My correspondent adds a further note about these links - not far from Nordfjord, on the west coast of Norway, recent excavations at the site of a former monastery have revealed a coin bearing the date 792.

It appears it was minted near Newcastle-upon-Tyne - part of a Viking's plunder perhaps? Or just a souvenir from a trip to England?

Somewhere near Richmond, on the south side of the road which leads up to Reeth, there used to be a cave known as Arthur's Oven.

As this snippet of information dates to about the 1870s, it is possible that knowledge of the precise whereabouts of the cave no longer exists or, of course, it might have been filled with rubbish, built upon or destroyed for a variety of reasons.

None of my reference books provide any further clue to its whereabouts, nor indeed is there any hint of any story which is linked to this cave.

It does make one wonder, however, whether the legendary King Arthur ever came to Swaledale.

Most of us are familiar with the wonderful tale of Potter Thompson, who disturbed the slumbering Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table beneath Richmond Castle and, course, there are other stories of his presence in Yorkshire.

However, one definition of oven suggests it was a compartment not only used for cooking but also for drying, so perhaps Arthur and his knights made use of this shelter for drying their clothes after a hard day defending the realm