A: I LIVE near Redcar but occasionally work in Seaham where, to my surprise, they seem to call streams becks. Around Redcar, streams are called becks, but I always thought that the word in Durham was burn. Where is the cut off area for becks and burns? - Vic Wood, Yearby, Redcar.

Q: From the point of view of County Durham, it is especially interesting because there are, in England, three main words for larger streams - brook, beck and burn. County Durham lies on the border of the beck/burn area. There are also other words like sike and gill, but these are generally much smaller streams.

Brook is a Dutch word which originally meant marsh but it was later adopted for stream. It is used mainly in the Midlands and southern England but is also the usual word for a stream in Lancashire and Derbyshire. Brook occurs in some of the more southerly parts of Yorkshire, notably west of Sheffield and south of Huddersfield. Generally, however, Yorkshire uses beck.

Brook seems to have entered the language later than the other two words and is most likely to have replaced burn or bourn. Beck is a Scandinavian word introduced by the Vikings and also replaced burn or bourn.

Becks are found in areas of Norwegian settlement, like Cumbria and northern Lancashire, and in Danish settled areas like North Yorkshire, East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Like North Yorkshire, most of Norfolk is a beck area but the word gives way to brook as we move towards Suffolk.

Of the three main words for a stream, burn has been used the longest in England but only survives in Northumberland and northern County Durham. Strangely it is also used throughout Scotland, but it is not a Scottish word. It was actually introduced to Scotland by the Anglo-Saxons.

County Durham is a transitional zone between beck and burn and, according to the maps, the Tees valley is a beck area, the Tyne valley a burn area and the Wear, a mixture of the two.

According to the Ordnance Survey Atlas of Durham, there is a mixture of the two words along the Wear valley between Wolsingham and Spennymoor and a dominance of the word beck just east of Durham City in the Sherburn/Pittington area.

North of the Wear it is entirely burns and further east the map shows burns around Easington and Seaham, despite your comments that Seaham people call them becks.

When I was at school, I distinctly remember lads from Sherburn using the word beck, and I can also recall an audience of elderly people at a talk in Chester-le-Street who all called their local streams burns. In these two cases dialect words are confirmed by the map.

We should presume that map-makers consulted local people when they named streams, so it may be that the people of Seaham called their streams burns within recent memory, but are now using beck.

I would be very interested to hear what readers across the region call the streams in their local area - becks or burns?

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