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.