Abreast-shaped hill is a hill in the shape of a breast. Some such hills are named "Pap", an archaic word for the breast or nipple of a woman. Such anthropomorphic geographic features are found in different places of the world and in some cultures they were revered as the attributes of the Mother Goddess, such as the Paps of Anu, named after Anu, an important female deity of pre-Christian Ireland.[1]
The name Mamucium that gave origin to the name of the city of Manchester is thought to derive from a Celtic language name meaning "breast-shaped hill", referring to the sandstone bluff on which the fort stood; this later evolved into the name Manchester.[2][3]
Breast-shaped hills are often connected with local ancestral veneration of the breast as a symbol of fertility and well-being. It is not uncommon for very old archaeological sites to be located in or below such hills, as on Samson, Isles of Scilly, where there are large ancient burial grounds both on the North Hill and South Hill,[4][5]orBurrén and Burrena, Aragon, Spain, where two Iron Age Urnfield culture archaeological sites lie beneath the hills.[6]
Many of the myths surrounding these mountains are ancient and enduring and some have been recorded in the oral literature or written texts; for example, in an unspecified location in Asia, there was a mountain known as "Breast Mountain" with a cave in which the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma (Da Mo) spent a long time in meditation.[7]
Travelers and cartographers in colonial times often changed the ancestral names of such hills. The mountain known to the Indigenous Australian people as DidholorDithol (Woman's Breast) was renamed Pigeon House Mountain by Captain James Cook at the time of his exploration of Australia's eastern coast in 1770.[8]
Mamelon (from French "nipple") is a French name for a breast-shaped hillock.[9] Fort Mamelon was a famous hillock fortified by the Russians and captured by the French as part of the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the 1850s. The word mamelon is also used in volcanology to describe a particular rock formation of volcanic origin. The term was coined by the French explorer and naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent.[10]
[The word 'Canberra'] means cleavage – the space between a woman's breasts, that's Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie, and a very very important area for our people, indeed a corroboree ground for our people, right where the National Museum of Australia is today.
