Towthorpe appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, entered under the hundred of Scard in Yorkshire.

Other Settlements in Scard

The Meaning of the Name

The name Towthorpe is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word þorp, an outlying or secondary farmstead. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a outlying farm’.

Names of this type are a fingerprint of Scandinavian settlement: they cluster across the old Danelaw, where Norse-speaking settlers renamed or founded villages from the late 9th century onward.

Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as Towthorpe.

Scheduled Monuments Near Towthorpe

Scheduled monuments are nationally important archaeological sites given legal protection. 1 lies within roughly a mile of Towthorpe:

Towthorpe medieval settlement - 0.93 km

Towthorpe Today

Today Towthorpe lies within the administrative area of Fimber.

Read more about modern Towthorpe on Wikipedia .

Nearby Domesday Settlements

Other places recorded in the 1086 survey within a few miles:

Burdale - 3.0 km W
Sledmere - 3.6 km NE
Croom House - 4.2 km NE
Fridaythorpe - 4.2 km SW
Wetwang - 4.2 km SE
Wharram le Street - 5.0 km NW

Heritage Around Towthorpe

Photographs of churches, listed buildings and monuments in the vicinity, contributed by volunteers to the Geograph project and reused here under a Creative Commons licence.

Images © their respective photographers, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 and reused here with attribution. Photographs depict listed buildings, churches and monuments near this settlement and may show neighbouring villages.

Towthorpe in the Domesday Book (1086)