This is the most straightforward part of the British section of the Ravenna Cosmography. That the author is able to proceed in a relatively logical manner here, and that his attempt to pick up on earlier omissions – at 10837 to 10838 – is obvious should demonstrate that he was not quite the incompetent muddler Rivet and Smith (1979, 187) would have us believe. If not the most logical of thinkers, he does set out with a plan and follows it. The problems arise from the manner in which he corrects his mistakes: he simply inserts the ‘missing’ names without explanation at the point he had reached when he noticed his error.
The progress of the list is clockwise (if we omit his return to the north-east after dealing with East Anglia and north Kent). There are a few names in the list which do not appear to be of rivers – for instance *Tamio, Cardiff, at 10828 – and these were presumably mistaken by the author as river-names because they were written ‘in the sea’ on his map source. The glaring omissions from this list, such as Tamesa, the Thames, occur as habitation names, probably because they were written in an inland position on the map. This is the most logical solution to the problem, otherwise we have to assume that the Cosmographer (or his map source) decided not the include the names of major rivers, which is surely inconceivable.