How to pronounce Boulmer, ‘tiny’ Northumberland fishing village

It also has a name that catches almost every visitor out on their first visit.

How to pronounce it

The correct pronunciation is Boomer.

Not Bowl-mer. Not Bool-mer.

Boomer, like the word some young people would use to describe someone born after the Second World War.

Why does it sound like that?

The answer lies in the village’s age.

The name Boulmer is recorded in earlier documents as Bulemer, and derives from the Old English bulan-mere, meaning “bull’s mere” – a mere, or pool, frequented by bulls.

Over centuries of use in the Northumberland dialect, the spelling calcified while the spoken form kept moving, until the gap between the two became impossible to guess from the page alone.

There is a second theory.

The RNLI’s own archive, recording the lifeboating families of Boulmer, notes that the origin of the name “is given as Bull’s Mere or Bow Mere, the second being more probably right, from the shape of the water in the haven, enclosed by reefs of rock in the shape of a bow.”

The haven itself was known locally as the Mer-Mouth, pronounced “Marmoothe.”

A third possibility comes from even earlier.

The North Cottage Boulmer website notes that the village’s name may have its first roots in ancient Gaelic, in the words Búir na mara, meaning “roar of the sea.”

Whether the Gaelic, the Old English or the bow-shaped haven is the true origin is a question scholars have not fully settled, but the pronunciation has been fixed for as long as anyone can remember: it is Boomer.

The village itself

Boulmer sits on the Northumberland Coast National Landscape three miles north of Alnmouth, accessed along a narrow road through the dunes.

It is one of the last genuinely working fishing villages on the Northumberland coast, and the pub, The Fishing Boat Inn, sits steps from the shore. RAF Boulmer — also officially pronounced “RAF Boomer” — occupies the land behind the village and is home to the Air Command and Control Force.

One English-learning visitor who walked the coastal path from Alnmouth wrote drily online in response to place names with strange pronounciations, saying: “Boulmer, pronounced Boomer for some reason.

“How people ever learn English I’ll never know. It’s hard enough coping with the various accents without pronouncing things differently to how they look.”

They are not wrong. But now you know.