Place Name
Originally called Warple Road or the Warple New Road. The names North and South Worple Way did not come into use until 1894, although the Worple Way was an ancient bridleway between White Hart Lane and Sheen Lane running between Ewe or Town Furlong and Short Furlong, in the Mortlake Common Field. When the railway was built in 1846 on the original Worple Way, it was ordered that a track should be built on either side. Charles Hailstone in the Alleyways of Mortlake and East Sheen explains its origins: “The Wapple, Whapple, Warple, Warepall or Worple Way, as it occurs in old records, comes from the Saxon wearp in the sense of to throw or cast up. A ridge of land was in provincial husbandry called a wapp, perhaps from a similar source… For hundreds of years the Worple Way was the means of access to Ewe Furlong on its north side and Short Furlong on the south.”
I believe, although I can’t remember where this is from, that the word also referred to the ridges left behind by furrowing with horses. I did Anglo-Saxon at Uni and maybe heard it there. This is likely to be the origin of the word as applied to a ridge of higher land.