Teign Grace takes its second name from the Grace family, its owners six centuries ago; but people tell me that it really is Teignrace and takes its name from a race in the river Teign a little way below. There was no race there till 1863, when this branch line was begun. The railway blocked a wide curve in the river, and gave it the sharp twist that makes the race.
Kingswear is King’s Wear, yet I have heard it called King Swear; and I have also heard Kingskerswell called Kings Curse Well. (It is the part of Kerswell that was kept by the Crown, and Abbotskerswell is the part that was given to Torre Abbey.) But, apart from the pronunciation, the spelling may be misleading in such names as Kerswell, Ogwell, Loddiswell, etc. A well may often be the nucleus of a settlement in arid regions, but not in regions that are full of springs and streams; and in many of these Devonshire names the ‘well’ must stand for ‘vill,’ the ancient term for ‘village.’ As a matter of fact, the termination is spelled with an _i_ in twenty-two cases out of twenty-seven in the Exeter manuscript of Domesday.
Domesday has nearly a hundred entries of places in Devon with names that end in ‘ford,’ but only two with names that end in ‘bridge.’ These are Tanebrige and Talebrige in the Exchequer manuscript, but the Exeter manuscript has Taignebrige and Talebrua; so the second name seems dubious. (The first, of course, in Teignbridge.) These terminations give a notion of the roads then, and sometimes also of the streams. A mile from here there is a place called Elsford, where there is not any ford nor anything to be forded. It is an old place, mentioned in Domesday as Eilauesford and at that time (twenty years after the Conquest) still in the possession of a Saxon thane. It stands on the edge of the table-land between the valleys of the Wrey and the Teign; and if there ever was a ford there, there must have been a little river running off the table-land and down into the Wrey along a gully in the hill-side, where there is hardly a trickle now.
There is a place called Yeo close by the Wrey, a Twinyeo at the confluence of the Wrey and Bovey, and another at the confluence of the Bovey and Teign; and both Twinyeos are Mesopotamias, being in between the streams. Yeo here means ‘stream’ or ‘water,’ as in Yeoford. But a yeoman is not a waterman--he is a land man; and there, I think, the ‘yeo’ is to be linked with ‘gau’ in German, not with ‘eau’ in French. There are traces of an Anglo-Saxon word like ‘gau’ for ‘place’ or ‘land’; and the _g_ would easily become a _y_, as in ‘year’ and ‘day’ for ‘gear’ and ‘dæg.’