Reports:
Chris Cameron “Birds and animals in Borders place-names”
The Carrifran Burn, a tributary of the Moffat Water in the rugged upland country of north-east Dumfriesshire. The name has difficulties, but a Cumbric counterpart of Welsh brân, ‘crow’ or other corvid, is suggested for the last syllable. Raven Craig, the dark mass at the back of this scene, gives circumstantial support, while Bran Law, just north of the Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall, is in the same group of hills. (Photo Chris Cameron)
I’ve always loved hill country, birds, place-names and maps, and this talk brought these together in an illustrated tour of place-names in south-east Scotland which appear to denote various bird species. Such place-names - mainly low-profile features of the landscape - are, inevitably, largely undocumented other than appearing in a range of maps: names known to generations of local country folk, and transmitted orally to cartographers. Only three birds of these species no longer occur in the area, and many still occur in the named sites – thus gratifyingly justifying the claims made for their meanings. This summary of the talk briefly analyses the etymology of less than half of the local names covered in the talk - both as lexical items, and in terms of their species-denoting constituent elements. Although in most instances place-names tend to have been generated in respect of conspicuous breeding species, a few denote non-breeders (winter migrants) and small ‘non-descript’ resident species.
I made use of information I obtained from a study for an MSc I carried out a few years ago, which dealt with the etymology of non-standard bird-names in south-east Scotland known to members of the local (mainly elderly) population. Most of the bird-names discussed in the talk were known to, and/or still used by the informants.
Each entry consists of a named species, followed by (a) its local name(s), (b) the place-name(s) claimed to contain the term(s), and (c) the suggested etymology of the ornithological component of the term (# = no longer used as local name, * = reconstructed/not recorded. Species). BM=summer (breeding) migrant, WM = winter (non-breeding) migrant, E = ‘extinct’ in the area (previous breeder): all others denote resident species.
County names quoted are those pre-1975 reorganisation – Berwickshire (Bk), Roxburgh-shire (Rox), Selkirkshire (Sk), Peeblesshire (Pb), East Lothian (EL), Mid Lothian (ML), eastern Dumfriesshire (Dm)
Languages underlying the bird-denoting components of the place-names to be discussed are indicated by the following abbreviations: -
Cu Cumbric (i.e. name given to form of P-Celtic formerly spoken in part of the region), Fr French, Gk Greek, Gm German, L Latin, ME Middle English, ModEng Modern English, N Norse, OE Old English, OFr Old French, OGm Old Germanic, ON Old Norse, OSc Old Scots, Sc Scots, WGm West Germanic, W Welsh. I use Sc to denote either Scots or Scottish Standard English.
onom = onomatopoeic bird-name, imit = imitative bird-name
selected species and their place-names
bittern (E): (a) many (lit. only) e.g. ‘boomer’# ‘bull o’ the bog’# ‘mire-drum’#: (b)1 Bemersyde (Bk), (b)2 Butterdean, Butterlaw (Bk): (c)1, Bemersyde -standard derivation OE bemere ‘place of trumpeting (booming) bird (bittern)’, transferred meaning fr OE bemere ‘trumpeter’ ): (c)2, Butterdean , Butterlaw (bittern dean, law): bittern, borrowing fr OFr butor, L buteo ‘bittern’, fr butire (‘boom like a bittern’) onom. L nickname Taurus ‘bull’ – hence ‘bull o’ the bog’ etc: Fr butor conflation of but- + taurus?
black-headed gull: (a) pickiemaw: (b) Pickie Moss (Bk): (c) Sc pickmaw (1450) fr. Sc pickie, shortened form of pickiemaw OE pic ‘pitch’ + OSc maw, ON mar ‘gull’ + Sc dimin suffix –ie.
buzzard/kite a) gled: (b) Gladhouse* (ML), Gladsmuir (EL), Gledswood (Rox): (c) ME glede, OE glida ‘glider’.
Gladhouse, Midlothian, with its well known reservoir, is named after the gled, the gliding bird (buzzard or kite). (Photo Chris Cameron)
cormorant and shag: (a) scart: (b) Scart Rock (EL): (c) Sc variant of ON skarfr via Norn (Orkney and Sh) – ?imit.
curlew: (a) whaup: (b) Whappenshaw (Pb): (c) OE hwilpe ‘sea-bird’ occurs in 9thC OE poem, The Seafarer, but precise identity of species unclear: onom.
cuckoo (BM): 1(a) gowk: (b) Gowkie* (Bk): (c) OSc name for cuckoo ‘gokh’, ON gaukr (onom). 2(a) cog#: (b) Penicuik (ML): (c) W/Cu cog ‘cuckoo’.
Gowkie Woods, Berwickshire, should be good habitat for the cuckoo (Scots ‘gowk’).
(Photo Chris Cameron)
hen-harrier: 1(a) pyttel# (b) Peatle Hill (Sk), Pittlesheugh (Bk): 2(a) puttock# (prob = buzzard/kite, not harrier (b) Craigenputtock (Dm)]: (c) ME putian ‘hurl against/thrust’ + OE –uc, trad. bird-name suffix.
heron (R): 1(a) cranie: (b) Cranshaws (Bk): (c) OE and OSc cran ‘crane’ + Sc ‘dimin’. suffix –ie.
2(a) hersie# (b) Hersie Cleuch (Sk): (c) Fr loan heronceau ‘young heron’ (-ceau Fr dim. suffix), onom
magpie: (a) pye/pyat: (b) Pyetshaw (Rox): (c) ME piet (1225) Fr pie + Fr dim. suffix –et, OFr piot, L pica ‘magpie’ (ModEng pied ‘black and white’ derived meaning fr pie).
meadow pipit: (a) titling: (b) Titling Cairn (Bk): (c) ON titlingr ‘sparrow’ from tit ‘small creature’ (onom - imitation of pipit’s call) + -lingr, ON equiv. of OE suffix –ling ‘young of bird/animal’
merlin: (a) merlin: (b) merlin cleuch (Sk): (c) merlyon (1325), Anglo-Norman merillon, OFr emerillon, older form esmerillon, WGm semril, ON smyrill (all denoting ‘merlin’). Final –l dimin?
peregrine: 1(a) faucon: (b) Falcon Craig (Dm): (c) OFr faucun, L (late) falco ‘sickle’. Not in OE, 2(a) hawk: (b) hawkness (Bk): (c) OE hafoc (ON haukr), root hav- + bird-dim –uc, cognate with L capere
raven: (a) revin: (b) Raven Burn (Rox): (c) OE hrefn (first attested 800): 2(a) corbie: (b) Corbie Heugh (Bk): (c) dimin form of ME corb, fr Fr corb (variant of corp), or of its derivs corbin/corbel, L corvus: 3(a) bran#: (b) Carrifran* (Dm): (c) W/Cu brân ‘raven’
ring ouzel (BM): (a) hill blackie: (b) blackie sike (Sk): (c) reduced form of blackbird [recent only], OE blæc + bridd ‘young bird’. Blackbird previously rendered by ouzel. Before c.1300 crows and ravens were known as ‘black fowles’ since before that date ‘bird’ could only denote ‘small bird’.
skylark: (a) laverock: (b) Laverockbraes (Bk): (c) ME lark, OE lawerce ‘little song’ – onom.
swallow/house martin (BM): (a) swallie: (b) Swallie Dean (Bk): (c) OE swealwe, ON svala, OGm *swalwo ‘cleft stick’.(refers to appearance of black-barred crossed flight-feather tips at rest).
thrush [(a) song- and (b) mistle-]: (a) mavis, big mavis: (b) Mavishall (EL): (c)= song thrush (1400), adoption of Fr mauves, Spanish malvis (pre-1150 – borrowed from Fr): earlier forms and meaning unknown.
white-tailed eagle (E): (a) earn#: (b) Yearn Gill Knowe (EL): (c) ME ern, OE earn, OGm arn, ON örn. Celtic (W) eryr, Gk [ornis] ‘bird’ – taboo word.
wood pigeon: 1 wood pigeon / feral pigeon: (a[i]) skemie: (b) Skemie Law (EL): (c) etymology unknown, ? fr Sc (l.18-e.20C) skimmer ‘glide along easily and quickly’: (a[ii]) cushie: (b) Cushat Knowe (Sk), (c) ME coushote, OE cu/ scote ? cu (sound of bird) + OE sceotan (noun derived fr. vb. sceotan ‘to move rapidly like an arrow from a bow’. No Gm cognates. 2 rock dove: (a) doo: (b) Dowlaw (Bk): (c) Sc doo la14C, OE dufe, Gm root *duv-, imit.
Chris Cameron
Maggie Scott “Non-Celtic place-names of the Borders: a celebration of the work of May Williamson”
Dr May Williamson needs little introduction, as she is known to many of you and is a long-standing member of the Scottish Place-Name Society. In recent years, May has focused on research into street-names. Her publications include several works on the subject: The Origin of Burntisland and Kinghorn Street Names (1992), The Origin of Street Names of South Queensferry and Dalmeny (1993) and The Origins of Street Names of Dalkeith (1996). She continues to be an active contributor to place-name studies and her latest work includes a number of articles on Aberdeenshire street-names which have appeared in the local magazine The Leopard.
The paper I read at the Newtown-St-Boswells SPNS Conference, however, focused on May’s contribution to the study of the place-names of the Borders, largely through her PhD thesis of 1942, The Non-Celtic Place-Names of the Scottish Border Counties, which she wrote at Edinburgh University. Working through the charters of the monastic houses of the Borders and many other historical records, May collected the early spellings for many hundreds of names and analysed over one hundred place-name elements.
Unfortunately, her thesis was never published, and therefore much of her research has remained relatively inaccessible to the general public. It has largely fallen to other onomasticians to raise awareness of May’s work through their own, and to acknowledge the advantages afforded to them by her ground-breaking endeavours.
In many cases, subsequent lexical and onomastic research has provided further support for May’s interpretations of Border names. The raw material in her thesis remains of vital importance to ongoing place-name research, even when there are shifts in related lexical research, new onomastic discoveries take place, or over-arching theories change. For example, the current theory governing the chronology of Old English place-names in Scotland has changed significantly since 1942, but that in no way detracts from the fact that May Williamson was the first person to identify this group of names and recognise their collective importance. Future shifts in the perception of settlement patterns and name coinage will not diminish the value of her pioneering efforts.
The Conference paper illustrated several other ways - too lengthy to repeat here - in which May’s work is still very relevant to onomastic research today, providing an excellent foundation for new onomastic research, and therefore continuing to influence related disciplines including historical linguistics and historical lexicography.
Maggie Scott
Ian Fraser “Field-names of the Borders”
Peter Drummond “Place-names of the Pentlands and other Borders hills”
West Kip is one of the most pointed of the Pentland Hills, in a straightforward and fairly common topographic usage of this Scots term for a jutting-out feature. DSL tells us that there are cognates such as Middle Low German Kippe, ‘point, peak, tip’, and Dutch kip, ‘beak’. Some topographic place-names, however, are more likely to refer to other elements such as Gaelic ceap, ‘block or shoemaker’s last’. (Photo Pete Drummond)
Most place-names contain standard toponymic elements: in village and farm names, are found elements like Aber- or Bal- or Kil- or Pit-. In hill-names there are also such elements: in Gaelic there are Ben, Sgurr, Carn, etc or Norse Fell; in the Borders we would naturally expect Scots or English elements. The Pentlands are normal in that they contain many of the standard name-elements of the Borders hills. This is not a new discovery. Back 230 years ago, a Captain Armstrong of Innerleithen wrote thus:
“Hills are variously named according to their magnitude: as Law, Pen, Kipp, Coom, Dod, Craig, Fell, Top, Drum, Tor, Watch, Rig, Edge, Know, Knock, Mount, Kaim, Bank, Hope, Head, Cleugh-head, Gare, Scarr, Height, Shank, Brae, Kneis, Muir, Green, etc” (1775)
Some of these elements are inaccurate – a hope is invariably a valley, for instance – and he misses out some other common ones like cairn, pike, seat and side. However over half of these elements are found in the Pentlands range.
So what does Pentlands itself mean? It has nothing to do with the Pentland Firth (a corruption of Norse Pictland or Pettland), for there are no Norse names round here. The earliest occurrence is of the habitation name, circa 1150, as Pentlant, a little east of the northern part of the hills: the hamlet is still there, now Old Pentland, near IKEA. On Blaeu’s map, one hill in the north of the range – possibly Castle Law or nearby – is named as Pentland Hill. Now hills are sometimes named after farms at their foot (e.g. Turnhouse Hill, Carlops Hill), and very rarely vice versa. And it is likely that by chance this one hill, named after the hamlet or farm, in turn gave its name to the whole range. So what did the hamlet name mean? Pen is clearly Welsh or Cumbric, meaning ‘head’ (cf Penicuik, Pencaitland), while llan (pronounced thl - note Blaeu’s Penthland spelling) can mean a church, or simply a glade or enclosure. Seeing a ‘range’ is a relatively modern concept: in Gaelic, the Cairngorms are the Monadh Ruadh (i.e. singular); in southern Scotland, the Lammermuirs (from lambre mor) and Moorfoots (from mor thwaite) began as singular hill-masses, becoming plural only latterly. Individual hills were named earlier, but “seeing” a whole and distinct range came later – thus ‘the Pentlands’ was a convenient label when travel speeds advanced sufficiently for them to be passed or negotiated in a day, before moving on to other areas.
Moving to individual hills, let’s look at them in their probable language groups.
The oldest names are apparently of Cumbric or Brittonic origin. Caerketton, towering over the Hillend ski slopes, was often mapped as Kirkyetton, but there is no such church anywhere near here. There is however an old fort on the eastern shoulder, which would suggest an origin in caer, a fort. Carnethy, the second highest in the range, may come from the root carn, since there is a large prehistoric cairn on top. A connection has also been suggested with the Welsh ‘Munro’ called Carneddau (meaning cairns), plausible because it fits very well with the Welsh pronunciation. [A 1682 map had it as Kairnathur (which invokes the legendary king) but this is surely a phonetic misinterpretation.] The Cumbric word mynydd, still found in Welsh, and meaning hill or mountain, is almost certainly the root of Mendick; and may well be the source of the several nearby hills with mount names – The Mount, Byrehope Mount, Faw Mount and Mount Maw, and The Black Mount. Further north in Scotland mount is derived from Gaelic monadh – The White Mounth, Mount Blair – but these seem to be an exceptional cluster, away from Gaelic source areas, and near Mendick.
There are some Gaelic names, but only a few, and their distribution is interesting – they are generally lower hills (five of them bear the symptomatically-small element tor) and are clustered around the western fringes of the range, unable to penetrate through to the east at all – it’s as if the Pentlands were a barrier to the movement of Gaelic speakers. And of course protecting Peebles-shire cattle and maidens from the Gaelic caterans and reivers. Dunsyre Hill in the far south-west has ancient cultivation terraces striping its sides, and is probably dùn siar (western fort): where’s the eastern one? – probably Keir Hill near Dolphinton, three miles east, keir being a Scots word for fort derived from caer. Mealowther on the west is probably Meall Odhar (dun-coloured hill), being mapped in 1821 as Millowderhill – there’s another hill of this name near East Kilbride. The Gaelic creag appears in Craigengar (of the hare) and Craigentarrie (of the bull) – the latter a mere hillock which has lost its original reference to the name of a farm, now ruined too! Torweaving is possibly from tòrr uaimhinn, hill of horror or devastation – and it’s such an innocuous swelling, too! And of course up in the north-west corner we have the three little ’uns – Torphin, Torduff, and Torgeith – volcanic pimples, one mainly quarried away, respectively the white, dark and windy tors.
The majority of the hills have Scots or English elements (see the piechart below.) Some, like Turnhouse Hill and Spittal Hill, are simply named after the farm below them, whose stock were probably put out to graze on them in summer: Spittal is from the hospice (hospital) run by the monks at Newhall. Others are descriptive of the landscape, like Black Hill (formerly Loganhouse Hill from the farm below, but much better identified by its dark heather cover): above Dolphinton there are a Black Mount, heathery, and its neighbour White Hill, pale grass-covered. The West Kip (photos above and on back cover) is a lovely pointed hill seen from north or south, and has a little projection near the top seen from east or west, thus fitting the dictionary definition of a kip to a tee – as does the Kippit Hill in Dolphinton, said by legend to be where the devil sieved out the sand from the boulders he threw into Biggar Moss. But many of the greater and lesser names in the range find an echo from Captain Armstrong’s 1775 list of elements: Bleak Law, East Kip, Dod Hill, Green Craig, Windlestraw Top, Cock Rig, Bavelaw Edge, Cairn Knowe, Muckle Knock, Faw Mount, Dun Kaim, Kay Bank, Greystone Head, Yield Brae and Allermuir. Not to mention two of The Pike, a Green Side, and a Seat Hill. Nearly a score of Scots hill-name elements, packed into a small but lovely range of hills.
Pie chart illustrating relative frequency of commoner elements in Pentland hill names.
Pete Drummond