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.
Lich 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.
Jan 26, 2026 17:23This was a delight and I have given you a follow.
Aw, thank you!
As a Lichfeldian, good digging, it doesn't get explored very often.
It is, however, definitely full of zombies.
There's plenty of interesting archaeology that's been found too, underground passages possibly going much further than anyone can be sure of.
I am reminded of a definitely-very-suspicious gate at Pontefract castle with a prominent sign that said "this gate leads to an old well, and NOT to a labyrinth of secret subterranean tunnels". Which, you know, served only to convince us of the opposite.
