John Baldwin: Place-names of the Pentlands.
The Pentland Hills in the mid 17th century Atlas of Scotland published by the Blaeu family firm in Amsterdam. The settlement of 'Penthland' (now Old Pentland), 'Pentland Hill' and 'Penth-landt Hill' all appear.
Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh: Early recorded Gaelic place-names in Scotland.
Jake King (with Chris Yocum): the BLITON (Brittonic language in northern Britain) Project.
THE BRITTONIC LANGUAGE IN THE OLD NORTH
The Scottish Place-name Society's BLITON Project
Since 2001, Alan James has been researching the history of Brittonic in southern Scotland and northern England between the fifth and twelfth centuries. In the course of this study, he has assembled a comprehensive series of notes on P-Celtic elements (in their neo-Brittonic forms) that occur - or, in the views of place-name scholars, may occur - in place-names in the regions between the Forth and Loch Lomond in the north and the Humber and Mersey in the south. These notes include etymological information, references to authoritative writings on philological questions, discussion of semantic issues, details of place-names found in Classical and Early Mediaeval sources and in early Welsh literature referring to the 'Old North', and full lists of current and obsolete place-names in which these elements (may) occur, with references to published records of early forms and scholarly discussions of these names.
In 2007, the Scottish Place Name Society has undertaken to fund a project to digitise the database and make it available online. This work is being undertaken by Jacob King and Chris Yocum. The projects aims are twofold. Firstly it wishes to create a searchable online database from the dictionary. This will allow users to search either by a particular root, affix or element, as well as by place-name. At some point in the future it is envisaged that users will be able to integrate the data with google maps. Secondly, a traditional flat PDF document will be produced.
It is hoped that the letter A, as showcased at the conference, will go online over the next few months, for the purposes of testing and feedback Anyone who did not give their email to us at the conference and is interested in taking part in the beta version is free to email blitoldnorth@gmail.com.
Jacob King (summarising a presentation to the November 2007 conference)
Pete Drummond: Scots and Gaelic hill-names in southern Scotland.
In the hills north-west of Moffatdale, Dumfriesshire (photo by Pete Drummond). The small cairn is on Arthur's Seat, a ridge of Hart Fell, whose broad top is to the left of this view over the smooth south-west flank of Swatte Fell to cliffs on White Coomb and, to their right, the twin tops of the transparently named Saddle Yoke. The instances of fell are within the Dumfriesshire and Galloway territory of this element, with few outliers farther north or east, as discussed inside in an article on 'Gaelic and Scots in Southern Hill Names'. White Coomb may be named after the snow-bearing qualities of a coomb or 'hollow in a mountain-side' in its south-east face. Hart Fell and White Coomb are the same on William Crawford's Dumfriesshire map of 1804, but Saddle Yoke is Saddleback and Swatte Fell is Swaw Fell, making it more doubtful that Swatte represents swart, referring to the long stretch of very dark cliffs on the far side.
The two main languages which mould the hill-names of southern Scotland are Gaelic and Scots. Gaelic, although widespread across the western half of the area, with some penetration to the south-east, is in hill-names largely confined to Galloway. In this south-western area, most of the highest hills have a Gaelic name (e.g. Merrick, Benyellary), and over half of all its hill-names are rooted in that language. The River Nith, flowing down the east edge of Galloway, appears however to be an almost watertight boundary penning in the Gaelic hill-names, with all those to the east of it in Scots or Cumbric only: you have to go north-east to Lanarkshire and West Lothian to find a few other Gaelic hill-names. This is in spite of the fact that there are Gaelic settlement and water names east of the Nith. All the usual Gaelic hill-generic suspects are in Galloway, such as beinn, càrn, cnoc and druim, though a few others are posted missing, as we will see.
Massive cairn on Cairnkinna (552m) above the Scar Water, north-west Dumfries-shire.
W J Watson opined that Galloway's Gaelic names were more closely linked to Scottish (Highland) Gaelic than to Irish Gaelic, which might seem odd given how close Ireland is to the Mull of Galloway. His view was based on the fact that land measures in Galloway are as those of west Scotland, that bàrr is a common name for low hills in Galloway and Argyll, and there are other words like eileirg, deer trap, rare in Ireland but common in Scotland and Galloway. However he says that while sliabh is common in Ireland for mountain it is very rare in Galloway: subsequent research has shown that the element is in fact found here, although certainly not for a mountain of any size. Meanwhile the absence of the common Highland hill element cruach might be explained by the fact it is common in the west of Ireland and the north (i.e. opposite Kintyre) but not County Down (opposite Galloway). And càrn, used in Ireland for burial markers (unlike in the Highland hill-names), may be reflected in the chambered cairns found on hills like Cairnscarrow, Wigtownshire, and perhaps Cairnkinna, Dumfriesshire. So the jury must remain out on Watson's opinion on the linkage.
Two other hill-name generics common in the Highlands but not in Galloway are sgùrr and meall: the former is a word of Scandinavian origin and hence confined to the north-west, and not found here; the latter is there, but in disguise in the form of hill-names beginning Mill-, Mull- or Meaul, of which there are 67 altogether. They have the lumpy shape of meall hills, and some of the old forms like Mealdanach for Mulldonoch indicate their origin, as do lost names mapped by Pont like Meal Tuaichtan. Gaelic died out earlier in Galloway than the Highlands (by the 16th century), and hence 19th century OS mapmakers heard a local Scots pronunciation of meall far removed from the original. Another consequence of the early death of Gaelic here was that as the Gaelic elements in a name became obscure to Scots speakers, they became either corrupted or even dropped from part of the name: the Bin Maerack hill on one Blaeu map (Carrick) became simply Maerack on another (Galloway) because the latter's local informant, not understanding that the element 'Bin' (i.e. beinn) meant a hill, just omitted it.
Thus the hill now known as Merrick or The Merrick is translatable only as 'branched', i.e. as an adjective orphaned without a generic noun. Similarly, the hill called Bow above Loch Doon was probably once in name part of Meall Buidhe, but now remains translatable therefore as 'yellow': perhaps the top a mile away called Meaul is the absent generic meall of the orphaned buidhe specific, and the whole massif may once have been Meall Buidhe?
Galloway hills and lochs in Blaeu's map published in the mid 17th century, based on pioneer work by Timothy Pont at the end of the 16th century.
The inaccuracy and probable duplication ('L. Craigmatrick' and 'L. Mackatrick'?), compared to modern maps, doubtless reflect the physical difficulty of survey work in this scenic but rocky and boggy landscape dissected by deep streams. Acknowledgements to NLS for use of the online map.
Outside Galloway, Scots hill-names are largely built on Scots generics, of which there is a wide variety including fell, law, rig, dod, mount and muir. But although Scots is and has been the dominant language of all the southern hill areas bar Galloway for several hundred years, there is considerable variation in the frequency with which different generics are used in different areas, as Table 1 shows for a few examples. The two big players among these Scots generics are fell and law, the former of Scandinavian etymology (fjall), becoming a Cumbrian loan word before crossing to Scotland: the latter was an Anglian word, which came to signify a hill in Northumberland's northern English, but which really came into its own in Scotland.
Skelfhill Pen, dominant in this twilight silhouette, is one of many hills with distinctive shapes in the hill country of south Roxburghshire;
it is also one of the handful of hill names where Cumbric pen has become a Scots generic.
The relationship between fell and law, and the spread of these elements, are intriguing. Fell is found almost exclusively in the south-west, in Dumfries and Galloway, whilst law is found in the northern and eastern areas of Lanarkshire, the Lothians, and the counties of the Tweed Basin, as well as further north into the Ochils and Sidlaws. The watershed between the zones of law and fell is almost as watertight as the Nith is to Gaelic Galloway: hardly any fells lie north of the watershed, and only a few minor law hills lie to its south. The only significant hill to have crossed into 'enemy territory' is Culter Fell, whose story I told in Newsletter 21, as a probable landowner's transplant from Cumbria. On both sides of the watershed, the respective hill generic seems to have been applied to hills almost regardless of height or topography: there are high broad-topped hills with cliffs on one side (Broad Law and Hart Fell - though hers are larger), conical hills (Dirrington Law and Capel Fell), rounded hills (Deuchar Law and Loch Fell), and low hills (Mochrum Fell, 197m. and Down Law, 190m.). Even within each generic's own domain, there are variations: fell applies to the highest hills in Dumfriesshire (Hart Fell, Swatte Fell and others over 500m.) but to generally lower hills in Galloway (often below 200m.) round the fringes of the Gaelic high ground. Law applies not only to high but also to medium size hills and indeed to mere swellings in the Merse (respectively Dollar Law, Scald Law and Lempitlaw), and further to striking isolated hills like North Berwick Law.
There are other generics in Scots too, such as kip (pointed or projecting, e.g. West Kip), pike (a cairn, as in Pikethaw Hill), and the several listed in Table 1. Some others have entered Scots as loan words from Cumbric, a language which left its mark in hill-names down the central spine of the hills most remote from the sea. May Williamson suggested that that was where, when Anglian and other settlers pushed in, the Cumbric peoples retreated too, far from the fertile plains. Elements like caer (fort, as in Caerketton and, probably, Caresman Hill), pen (head, as in Penvalla and Penveny, and in loan word form in Skelfhill Pen), din (fort, as in Tinnis Hill), and mynydd or monið, a hill (as probably in Mendick, and perhaps Minch Muir), are all found. Close by Mendick the several hills with the apparently English mount in their name may well derive from this last Cumbric element: Black Mount was mapped by Pont as Black Munth (the Cumbric dd is pronounced approximately 'th'), The Mount, Faw Mount, and Mount Maw (conceivably mynydd mawr, big hill).
| Element | dod | fell | hill | knowe | law | rig |
| Hill area | - | |||||
| Lammermuir/ Moorfoot | 3% | - | 31% | 11% | 23% | 14% |
| Pentlands | - | - | 30% | 11% | 14% | 9% |
| Cheviot | - | 2% | 37% | 7% | 30% | 3% |
| Upper Tweed | 9% | 1% | 36% | 1% | 7% | 11% |
| Galloway | - | 5% | 38% | 3% | - | 5% |
| 'Dumfriesshire, NE' | - | 11% | 41% | 15% | 3% | 8% |
Table 1. Frequencies of hill name generics in hill areas of southern Scotland
Pete Drummond (including photos)
Dr Caroline Macafee: A. J. Aitken's final thoughts on Older Scots pronunciation.
Caroline Macafee has kindly provided this note on her talk to the November 2007 conference:-
About twenty years ago, at the second International Conference on the Languages of Scotland, Bill Nicolaisen expressed his disappointment that there wasn't more work on the detail and the chronology of sound-change in Older Scots. Happily, we now have a definitive treatment of the subject in Jack Aitken's posthumous The Vowels of Older Scots, edited by Caroline Macafee, and published by the Scottish Text Society in 2002. The book provides the essential framework for understanding the vowel systems of Older Scots: where they came from in Old English, Old Norse and Old French; how they changed, how they rhymed and how they were spelled in the course of the Older Scots period; and how they developed into the dialects of Modern Scots. The conference heard how Aitken's system of referring to the vowels by numbers operates and its advantages over other systems; and how to use the machinery of finding aids added by the editor, comprising three indices, which allow the user to approach the information either through the sources (e.g. a given vowel in Old English), through the Older Scots vowels, or through individual Older Scots words.