Meadow Road, Salisbury

Meadow Road is north of Salisbury city centre. It’s one of the roads that cut in half by the ring road.

The ‘Meadow’ is probably a reference to the land which is now the park opposite the Fire Station. The park is still typically known as ‘the meadows’, or ‘the water meadows’.

Definitions of the word ‘meadow’

The online definitions of the word ‘meadow’ vary slightly, around a common theme.

The Wiktionary, a sister project to Wikipedia, says that a meadow is

A field or pasture; a piece of land covered or cultivated with grass, usually intended to be mown for hay; an area of low lying vegetation, especially near a river. (¹)

Dictionary.com defines the word as

1. a tract of grassland used for pasture or serving as a hayfield.
2. a tract of grassland in an upland area near the timberline. (²)

The distinctive element of this definition are that the grassland is ‘upland’. I like the word ‘timberline’ here.

Wordnet, a website run at Princeton, says that a meadow is a

S: (n) hayfield, meadow (a field where grass or alfalfa are grown to be made into hay) (³)

I have no idea at all what alfalfa is, but it conjures up Steinbeck for me. Was Lenny going to grow alfalfa in ‘Of Mice and Men’?

Both Chambers and the Mirriam-Webster dictionaries bring us back to the low-lying lands

meadow noun 1 a low-lying field of grass, used for grazing animals or making hay. 2 any moist, grassy area near a river. meadowy adj. (⁴)

meadow: land in or predominantly in grass; especially : a tract of moist low-lying usually level grassland(⁵)

Salisbury’s ‘The Meadows’

‘The Meadows’ opposite the fire station fit some elements of the above definitions. The area is not ‘upland’ or near a ‘timberline’. Sadly it has probably never been graced by alfalfa, either.

‘The Meadows’ clearly fit the definitions which allude to ‘low-lying fields’ near a river.

Etymology of the word ‘meadow’

The word meadow comes from the Old English maedwe, which is from the Germanic maedwon

Need a room in Salisbury?

Try the Red Lion Hotel (⁶)

Footnotes

1. meadow – Wiktionary [↩]
2. meadow. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/meadow [↩]
3. [↩]
4. Chambers | Free English Dictionary [↩]
5. meadow. (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meadow [↩]
6. This is an affliate link, which means that I get commission if you book a room. Hooray! [↩]