Shitlington: A Cross, a Fair, and Eight Centuries of Unfortunate Spelling

In the Peak District sits a hill called Shatton Moor. My Duke of Edinburgh groups used to home in on it every time, like pigeons to a statue, and the jokes wrote themselves.

The name is almost certainly Old English. “Scēat-tūn” — a corner of land plus a farmstead. “The farm on the edge.”¹Key to English Place-Names. https://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/ Dull, really. The students were robbed.

Language does this constantly. Perfectly sensible words in one century become a gift to the back row of a classroom in another. Etymologists sigh. Teenagers rejoice. Nobody consults anyone.

Which brings us to Shitlington Cross, a medieval sandstone cross that once served the now-vanished village of Shitlington in Northumberland. Historic England dates it to the thirteenth century.²Historic England. Shitlington Cross C300 Yards West of Bridge House. List Entry Number: 1370440. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1370440?section=overview [Accessed 29 June 2026] A fair was held there. Four Elizabethan silver coins turned up nearby during the 1920s and 30s.³Northumberland Historic Environment Record. Shitlington Cross (Wark). Reference number: N7697. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=N7697&resourceID=110 [Accessed 29 June 2026] The settlement has long gone, though the name clings on at Shitlington Hall and Shitlington Crags — that line of crags you can see in the photo in the distance.

Northumbrian DoE groups presumably arrive at those crags expecting something. They will be disappointed.

The name has nothing to do with excrement. It comes from a reconstructed Old English personal name — Scytel, or Scyttel — combined with “-ing–” meaning “the people of” and the inevitable “tūn.” Scytel’s people’s farm. A thousand years of casual mispronunciation later, here we are. Medieval scribes made it worse, recording variants like “Schitlington” with cheerful inconsistency, because medieval spelling was not so much a system as a suggestion.⁴Wikipedia. Sitlington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitlington [Accessed 29 June 2026]

West Yorkshire once had its own Shitlington. It was renamed Sitlington in 1929, presumably by a council that had had quite enough.

English place names are littered with these traps. The landscape that gave them has spent a millennium wearing down sandstone crosses. We have spent the last two centuries sniggering at the Ordnance Survey. One of us has our priorities straight, and it is not us.

• 1
  Key to English Place-Names. https://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/
• 2
  Historic England. Shitlington Cross C300 Yards West of Bridge House. List Entry Number: 1370440. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1370440?section=overview [Accessed 29 June 2026]
• 3
  Northumberland Historic Environment Record. Shitlington Cross (Wark). Reference number: N7697. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=N7697&resourceID=110 [Accessed 29 June 2026]
• 4
  Wikipedia. Sitlington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitlington [Accessed 29 June 2026]