A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words 1467 entries

beck

BEK
A stream, specifically a fast one with a stony bed — the northern English word for what the south calls a brook. Becks run in becks: the word covers the water and, loosely, the little valley it has cut. In the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, it is not a poetic term but the ordinary one, and it is on the maps in the hundreds.
Etymology
Old Norse bekkr, a brook, carried into northern England by Danish and Norwegian settlement and never dislodged. It has cousins right across the Germanic world — German Bach, Dutch beek, Swedish bäck — and the German one is buried in more famous places than any of them, since the composer’s name simply means brook.
Notes
Compare burn in Scotland and Northumberland, gill or ghyll for the ravine a beck runs through, and force for its waterfall — also Norse, from fors. A walker in the Lakes can go a whole day using nothing but Viking vocabulary for the water, the ravine, the fell, the tarn, and the dale.
Old Norse river terrain water
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