This is the clocktower at Wallington. Wallington is one of a number of North East National Trust properties—perhaps most of them—with which I have strange mental associations, having worked on a ward named after it. But that needn’t detain us today.

Today’s scintilla of curiosity is found in the National Trust’s insistence, in signage and even on their website, that the thing pictured above is the ‘clocktower’—one word—not the ‘clock tower’, as I’d have written it. So let’s crack open the Oxford English Dictionary and see what’s going on there.

Except… there’s not much to say. ‘Clock tower’ is only listed as two words, with one example where it has been hyphenated. ‘Clocktower’ doesn’t appear. And in it’s National Heritage List for England Grade 1 entry, the structure is referred to as the ‘Clock Tower Gate’

So why the insistence on ‘clocktower’? I think it might be because they are often using it—perhaps even in all the examples I’ve seen—as part of a compound phrase, like ‘clocktower cafe’. This seems like a reasonable bit of linguistic tidying which even I can forgive… even if it’s not absolutely correct.