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marmota_bI stumbled upon the Wikipedia list of Czech mountains over 1000 m above sea level (our highest is 1603 m which, whoa, that's about 250 m more than Ben Nevis) and noticed that quite a few of them (still a minority, but a noticeable minority) have names that are basically a description of place.
The most striking one for me is U Kunštátské kaple - "At the Kunštát Chapel". They built a chapel on top of a nameless mountain in the 18th century, for the use of lumber workers, and now the official name of the mountain is that.
There are a couple of even more mundane ones, though. A couple more that consist of a description of place with a preposition. (There's at least one rather funny one.) A couple that have "Rocks" in the name because the most striking thing about the mountain isn't that it's tall but that it has a good rock formation.
I think my favourite are "Cow Mountain" and "Pig Mountain", and "Forest Mountain", which I am fairly sure are all really just straight up descriptors - in the first two cases presumably describing what sort of livestock you were grazing there.
I like it because a good deal of those mountains are taller than the highest mountain of Ireland, for example. Or Snowdon. And it's a good example of what happens when your whole country sits on top of a continent but without having that many truly impressive mountain peaks. It wasn't until accurate measurements and elevation above sea level specifically entered the picture that we noticed a lot of those are slightly more impressive than just some local hill.
(I have Real Life things I don't feel like writing about yet. This was a nice diversion.)
The most striking one for me is U Kunštátské kaple - "At the Kunštát Chapel". They built a chapel on top of a nameless mountain in the 18th century, for the use of lumber workers, and now the official name of the mountain is that.
There are a couple of even more mundane ones, though. A couple more that consist of a description of place with a preposition. (There's at least one rather funny one.) A couple that have "Rocks" in the name because the most striking thing about the mountain isn't that it's tall but that it has a good rock formation.
I think my favourite are "Cow Mountain" and "Pig Mountain", and "Forest Mountain", which I am fairly sure are all really just straight up descriptors - in the first two cases presumably describing what sort of livestock you were grazing there.
I like it because a good deal of those mountains are taller than the highest mountain of Ireland, for example. Or Snowdon. And it's a good example of what happens when your whole country sits on top of a continent but without having that many truly impressive mountain peaks. It wasn't until accurate measurements and elevation above sea level specifically entered the picture that we noticed a lot of those are slightly more impressive than just some local hill.
(I have Real Life things I don't feel like writing about yet. This was a nice diversion.)