The Name 'Gaddings'

Where does the name Gaddings come from?

‘Gaddings’ is an unusual name that has little or no local reference. There is evidence that the earlier, Rochdale Canal Company reservoir bore the name Gaddings, although there is also some suggestion, which is currently being researched, that it was initially known as Lumbutts Reservoir. The common dictionary definition of 'gadding' is ‘To move about needlessly or without purpose’, immediately throwing up the intriguing possibility that the Fieldens chose the name ‘Gaddings’ (or ‘Gaddens’ in Middle English) to cock a snoop at their neighbours in Jumb and Greenwood’s Mills, who had complained that the extra water supply from the Dam would have little purpose for them.

"Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,

With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown

And all their echoes mourn:

The willows, and hazel copses green,

Shall now no more be seen,

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays."

John Milton, Lycidas, written to commemorate a friend drowned in the Irish Sea, 1637.

The truth more probably lies in an alternative definition. A ‘Gad’ was a pointed tool used to quarry stone, and the ‘Gadding Car' was a cart carrying a drill used to bore a line of holes in stone. A look at the 1853 Ordnance Survey map of Gaddings shows two things: firstly, both reservoirs (Gaddings Dam West and East) were then known by the single name Gaddings Dam; and secondly, that there was a quarry to the east of the Dams called 'Gaddings Hole,' and two further areas simply marked 'Gaddings.' Given the quarrying definition of the word 'gad', the name ‘Gaddings’ probably refers simply to the fact that the reservoirs were constructed in an area of established quarrying, possibly partly using stone quarried from a quarry or 'gadding hole' adjacent to their site.