The sands of time past, present and future

PUBLISHED in 1611, Randle Cot-grave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues helpfully explained a foreign word that had been baffling British travellers on the coasts of France and the Low Countries: ‘Dune: f.… a Downe; a sandie banke, or hill neere the sea; called so... at first by the Flemmings… used, most commonly, in the plurall number, Dunes.’

Six or more centuries earlier, ‘dune’ had, in fact, belonged to England’s lexicon, too. According to an Anglo-Saxon version of St Matthew’s Gospel written in about 1000 AD , Christ came ‘to Olivetes dune’. Here, however, the translator was not relocating the Mount of Olives to the seaside; in Old English, dune meant a hill of any kind anywhere.

The word changed