EARLY on Tuesday morning, I woke with a jolt. A radio presenter, magically beaming his voice from London to my bedside, was talking about events taking place in Uff.

As I tuned in, Uff began to sound like an interesting place: there was a lighthouse at Uff, there was a museum at Uff, and exactly 100 years ago, Uff was bombarded by three German warships.

It was then that the jolt hit me. He, of course, was not talking about Uff. He was talking about the Heugh, the rocky outcrop of the Headland at Hartlepool, which was indeed bombarded by German warships in 1914.

But “heugh” is a horrible word. I immediately sympathised with the presenter. Not being a native North-Easterner, it is a word I look at and have no natural understanding of how to pronounce. In fact, I can think of several occasions when people have been talking about the location of various places in Newcastle and I have deliberately started my directions at the Tyne Bridge because I have no idea how to say “Redheugh”.

Redhue? Redyou? Redhuff? Reduff?

This is dangerous territory. In the 1950s, The Northern Echo carried an article about a village south of Darlington where the name was regularly mispronounced. All the natives, said the article, call it “Stap-ilton”, and so I adopted that pronunciation to fit in. However, I’ve never heard anyone alive call it that. Even those who’ve lived there 30 or more years call it “Stapleton” as if it were a piece of office stationery.

But the Gateshead bridge is probably “Red-yuff”, and Tuesday’s centenary celebrations in Hartlepool properly took place on the Yuff.

The Heugh is the ancient heart of Hartlepool – a town (or two towns, to be precise, but we won’t go into that here) whose name includes the Anglo-Saxon words “heorot” meaning “stag”, and “eu” meaning “island”. It is the bay, or pool, next to the island with the stag.

Heugh is regarded as a northern word for a rocky, cliffy promontory. It, too, must be Anglo-Saxon, though the suggested derivations are not always convincing: some sources say it is from “hoh”, which is a “a spur of land”, and helped name Tudhoe, for example, near Spennymoor; other sources point to “healgh” which was a small hill fort.

There are heughs from Aberdeen down to Durham. There are quite a lot of heughs in Northumberland – for example, Heugh Hill on Holy Island, which juts and rises just like Hartlepool’s Heugh. Indeed, just like Hartlepool’s Heugh has long had a military use, so has Heugh Hill where Osborne’s Fort was built as a gun emplacement in 1671 – every visitor to Holy Island must use the ruined window of Osborne’s Fort at the foot of Heugh Hill to frame a photograph of Lindisfarne Castle rising majestically on the other side of the harbour.

Hartlepool’s heugh is probably the most southerly heugh (my maps suggest it is south of Heugh Hall at Quarrington near Durham City). As the word leaves Durham, its vowel changes and it becomes “hough” – there are lots of Houghtons in the south of England – and by the time it reaches Cornwall it is “huw”. The largest town on the Sicilly Islands is Hugh Town, an ancient military settlement on a rocky finger of land beside the sea – which sounds a lot like Hartlepool’s Heugh.

Given these changes, it is difficult to get angry with the radioman’s mispronunciation – it is certainly not worth getting in a huff about yuff.