Slap
- in place-names, a slap usually has nothing to do with violence, and instead refers to either a pass through hills, or a shallow valley. A particularly good example of the former sense is found in the name of Cauldstane Slap, a pass that lies between West and East Cairn Hills, and stretches from the Scottish Borders to West Lothian. The term is also sometimes spelled slop, as in the lost place-name Barkerland Slop (1707), noted in A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Such spellings are closer to the original Middle Dutch slop and Middle Low German slop from which the Scots word derives.