This weekend we found ourselves in Lichfield, which has always struck me as an odd name for a place.
A bit of digging reveals the name comes from the Roman name Letocetum, which means "place of grey wood". It's thought this refers to the ash and/or elm trees which grew around the area. This then gets changed in Old Welsh to Luitcoyt (c.f. Modern Welsh coed = wood).
Old English then takes its own form, Licid, and appends -feld meaning open heathland to give Licidfeld, giving us Lichfield.
Unrelated, a lichfield (lower case) is another name for a graveyard. This sense comes from the use of "lich" to mean corpse.
Jan 26, 2026 17:23Lich meaning corpse, as often as not reanimated, is found through fantasy and folklore, but alas Lichfield is not named for a mass grave, nor is it full of shambling corpses (though, a bit, for all that).
Lich survives in English in the word lychgate which refers to a covered gateway to a cemetery or churchyard, where coffins typically rested before interral.
Lich itself comes ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leyg- and shares a linguistic root with like, alike, German gleich (=same, similar) and comes from the idea of a corpse/dead body being the likeness of a person.
TL;DR: Lichfield isn't full of zombies, but it is full of ash trees.
