TrigpointingUK

Hi
Does anyone know why Hopkins Mount is so called. Who names them etc
Irene Rogers

The names of stations on T:UK are those recorded by the OS at the time of installation. In many cases, station names are inexplicable or seem just plain wrong, but for consistency there's no other option.

It's fair to say that the OS were recording station names for their own internal purpose of identification; it probably never occurred to the surveyors that amateurs would be questioning their labelling decades later. In any case, rigidly fixed toponomy and single correct spellings are both very modern concepts. It seems likely that on fixing a given station, surveyors routinely asked the old farmer at the bottom of the hill what he called the place, without knowing or caring that the farmer on the other side of the hill called it something completely different. The benign contempt of monolingual colonial administration towards the other indigenous languages on these islands creates a further layer of confusion.

In this particular case, the OSGB36 station replaces an Old Trig, so in all likelihood it's been Hopkins Mount for 200 years.

Last night whilst reading Primary Trigs in Wales by John Davies I came across this paragraph - Eastacott Hill primary. Here the landowner queried the name of Eastacott saying he had always called it the Downs. Hotine replied that this was the name used during the 1853 Principal Triangulation and prevented any confusion with the many other 'Downs' in the region. He also reassured the owner that this was the official station name and would not appear as such on the new maps.

Not quite why locations were named but why pillars were named during the re-triangulation of 1935-1962

That's interesting. So we can maybe assume that not only did the OS default to a primary triangulation name when naming OSGB36 stations in the absence of any other information, they insisted on doing so even when queried. Which probably means that a great many OSGB36 stations bear 200 year old names.