© Maggie Scott 2008
This book takes a look at a variety of Scots terms that have been used to describe Scotland’s hills, valleys, rivers, settlements and streets. Each entry discusses a Scots word that can be found in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language and explores its connections with the landscape. Because this book focuses on the Scots language, you will not find all of Scotland’s place-names in it. Instead, you will find many Scots terms that are central to Scotland’s culture.
Many Scottish place-names have been coined in Gaelic, rather than Scots, or in languages that are now no longer spoken, including Old Norse and Old English. Others were coined in the Celtic language from which modern Welsh is descended, which was spoken in Scotland until the tenth century. Various different terms have been used for this language, including ‘British’ and ‘Brittonic’ and ‘Brythonic’, and the Celtic scholar Kenneth Jackson introduced the concept of separating the ‘Cumbric’ of southern Scotland from the ‘Pictish’ of north-eastern Scotland. It may be more accurate (and more straightforward) to describe it as ‘early Welsh’, but in this book I have adopted the convention of using ‘P-Celtic’, distinguishing it from the ‘Q-Celtic’ family of languages that includes Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx.
Another group of names that deserves special mention is river-names. Some of these are so old that they may have been coined before the Celtic languages split away from their Indo-European parent language, which is the common ancestor of most of Europe’s modern languages.
Besides the ancient river-names, many of Scotland’s best-known places are not Scots in origin. Glasgow is of P-Celtic origin and is made up of glas ‘green’, a term shared with Gaelic, and cau ‘hollow’, from which modern Welsh cau is descended. Perth is also from P-Celtic, and if you know the Welsh word perth ‘bush, thicket, copse’, you will quickly see the connection.
Gaelic was spoken all over Scotland at one time, and has left its mark in many place-names, particularly in the north and west. Inverness is from Gaelic inbhir nis, and marks the site of the mouth of the river Ness, inbhir signifying a confluence.
Many of the Scots terms discussed in this book are derived from other languages including Gaelic and Old Norse, and in some instances both the Scots term and its Celtic or Scandinavian ‘parent’ have been used to coin Scottish place-names. In the case of hill-names that incorporate the term knock, for example, it may be that the name is a Scots coinage, or it may be that the name is an original Gaelic formation, in which the Gaelic term cnoc, from which the Scots is derived, was used to coin the name. Further research is needed in order to analyse the name’s development.
When investigating the history of a name in order to draw some conclusion about its origin, it is necessary to look at all of the known historical spellings of the name, since names can alter radically during their lifetimes. The majority of Scottish place-names have been in existence since the Middle Ages and some (especially river-names) are considerably older. In his seminal work, Scottish Place-Names (2001), Professor W.F.H. Nicolaisen examines the history of the name Falkirk, tracing its evolution back to the twelfth century and charting its variant spellings in Gaelic, Latin and Scots. In Scots, Falkirk was often spelled Faukirk (1298, 1391, 1468, etc.) or Fawkirk (1391, 1392, 1537, etc.) and spellings with -l- are not recorded until the fifteenth century. The name may be translated as ‘variegated church’, from Middle Scots faw ‘of various colours’ and Scots kirk ‘church’. As Professor Nicolaisen points out, the later re-spellings with Fal- appear to represent an attempt to ‘correct’ the spelling, in recognition that Scots tends to drop the letter l in favour of this pronunciation (compare ba’, baw ‘ball’; ca’, caw ‘call’). This same phenomenon is seen in the historical spellings of the word chaumer ‘room, chamber’. In the sixteenth century, the word was frequently re-spelled as chalmer, as though the spelling chaumer (perfectly good Scots) reflected some sort of error.
The example of the history of Falkirk should serve to demonstrate that the study of place-names can involve many different languages and a great deal of painstaking research. What you will find in this book is a distillation of some of that research as it applies to the Scots terms that have been used to name our rural and urban landscapes.
It has become traditional in place-name studies to refer to the county names that pertained before the reorganisation of local government in the 1970s, and this convention has been observed here. A useful summary of the changes in governmental organisation is provided by the Department of Geography at the University of Edinburgh: yourscottisharchives.com/scottish-local-government
I hope you enjoy this exploration of the Scots language and the mark it has made on the landscape. Most of the quotations included in this book can also be found in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, which is what every good dictionary should be: an extraordinary storehouse of diverse and curious cultural information.
It’s soon’, no sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men,
And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken
E’en herts that ha’e nae Scots’ll dirl richt thro’
As nocht else could — for here’s a language rings
Wi datchie sesames, and names for nameless things.
(Hugh McDiarmid, ‘Gairmscoile’, Penny Wheep (1926))
Further Reading
Gelling, M., W.F.H. Nicolaisen & M. Richards, eds (1970), The Names of Towns and Cities in Britain, London: Batsford.
Nicolaisen, W.F.H. (2001), Scottish Place-Names, Edinburgh: John Donald.
Scott, M. (2003), ‘Scottish Place-Names’, in John Corbett et al. eds, The Edinburgh Companion to Scots, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Taylor, S., ed. (1998), The Uses of Place-Names, Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press.