For those of you who may not know much about the history of the name Woodhead I will describe its origin as I have come to understand it.  While I was growing up and would ask my father why we had to have a name like Woodhead that everyone made fun of (of course with Parris as my first name I couldn't win for trying) I was told that it was a name given to the people who took care of the woods surrounding a castle in old England and we were descended from those people.  That explanation didn't do anything to dissuade the school sports jocks from knocking on my head for good luck

    It wasn't until I visited England at age 30 and was engrossed in studying old census records of the area around the town of Woodhead that I finally learned to be thankful for the name Woodhead.  It happened when I saw that the people who lived at the "bottom of the woods" had also been given a place name as their surname- Woodbottom. 

     There is a town of Woodhead in Yorkshire, England.  It is actually close to the border with Derbyshire.  All that was left of the town when I visited there in the summer of 1994 was five houses and an unused chapel.  The current location of the town is right at the western entrance to the Woodhead Railway Tunnel.  There is even a small, unused train platform across the street from the houses.  The tunnel was closed in the 1980s and now has utilities running through it (electric, gas, etc.)  The highway that goes by the town and starts up into the Yorkshire Dales right after passing the tunnel entrance is A628 and it winds its way up through the hills and over Woodhead Pass.  Rain that falls west of Woodhead Pass runs down to Manchester on the west coast of England.  Rain that falls to the east ends up in Hull, on the east coast.  I sat on a roadside viewpoint bench at the top of Woodhead Pass and even in August it was cold and windy, but the view down to the valleys and farms below was pretty. 

     Just west of the town of Woodhead is the Woodhead Reservoir.  It is the highest of a string of reservoirs that captures drinking water for the city of Manchester.  And though there are "woods" in the area I couldn't see clearly any "wooded head" or "head of the woods" that would have given the area its name.  But of course it was named hundreds of years ago, so lots of trees have probably been cut down since.

     There is another town of Woodhead, this one in Scotland- in the far northeast of the country.  But I can't find out much information about it and don't know whether it was also named for a geographical feature, or maybe it was named after a Mr. Woodhead that settled there.  It could be that the Woodhead in Yorkshire is also named after a person, rather than vice versa, but my finding Woodbottoms in the area census makes me confident that the origin of Woodhead of Yorkshire is a geographical feature.