<<John Field in his diictionary of English Field Names has Bear Close/Croft/Field/Furlong/Hay & Lands, and Piece. Meaning: "land on which hard barley was grown". These names are spread across various counties - Oxfordshire, Cheshire, Berkshire, Shropshire. He says "see also Barcroft [OE bere]. The Barcroft entry with the same meaning as above, [from OE bere] includes Bare Acre, Bare Bottoms, Bare Field, Bare Flar, Bare Hill. Counties mentioned are Gloucestershire, Cheshire, Lancs, Leics, Shropshire, Derbyshire.>> The difficulty with bere/barley is that it did not create names with -s- and should have produced Bearhill, not Bearshill. The -s- might possibly have been intrusive, ie added at a later date, but to know whether that was the case one would need early forms of the name without it. There are a number of other OE words which could be the origin of a name in which the first element is Bear-, including bearu/grove, beorg/hill (though that would be rather tautologous), bar/boar, baer/pasture, bera/bear, beofor/beaver, or even berern/barn, beorc/birch, beger/berry (or even the Celtic word bar, meaning hill). However for many of them the same objection must be made - that they had no declined form ending in -s, and therefore are unlikely to have given rise to the form Bearshill. For bearu/grove it is possible, however - the genitive singular of bearu was bearwes. The plural of beorg/hill was beorgas, but Hillshill seems improbable. Margaret Gelling in 'The Landscape of Place-names' (p192) says 'when hyll is the generic in a compound name, masculine personal names are the most frequent qualifiers', and perhaps the most likely explanation for the medial -s- is that the hill was named for an individual - in names formed from an individual's name plus a generic element the personal name usually appears with a genetival -s. The name might have been Bera or Beora or Bara, or something more complicated which has been elided over the centuries. Interestingly, Maragert explains Burshill in East Yorkshire as deriving from byrst/landslip, which could also explain Bearshill. So there aris a range of possible explanations, but without early forms of the name it's difficult to choose between them. Matt