Simon Taylor and Pete Drummond write: 80 people attended the Scottish Place-Name Society Day Conference in the Aviemore Highlands Hotel, Aviemore, on Saturday 10 November. Despite the Highland venue, and some wintry weather on the previous Thursday, which had closed the Drumochter Pass for a time, it was in fact one of the best attended since the first SPNSociety conference, held in St Andrews in May 1996. The theme was, appropriately enough for Aviemore, hill- and mountain-names. The scene was set by Dr Seamas Grannd, Department of Celtic, University of Aberdeen, a native of the area, who has done extensive place-name collecting from native Gaelic speakers of Strathspey and Badenoch. His paper, entitled Some Place-names of the Northern Cairngorms, began in the hills: Am Monadh Ruadh, known in English misleadingly as the Cairngorms - Cairngorm (Càrn Gorm) is the name of only one of the many summits in this massif - Am Monadh Liath, and Am Monadh Gàidhig, which name is better known in Scots and Scottish English as Minnygaig,as in the Minnygaig Pass, between Glen Tromie and Glen Bruar. He finished up in the new hotel complex at Aviemore, right outside the window of the conference room, stripping off the overlying trappings of Scotland's St Moritz to reveal a Gaelic toponymy such as Am Rèidh Fada ('the long flat'), where the big car-park (formerly the ice-rink) now lies, Cnoc na Ceàrdaich ('knowe of the smiddy'), or Uchd an t-Sìthein ('brae, literally breast, of the fairy hill'). By the river lay An Dail Shuas and An Dail Shìos, literally the upper and the lower haugh or water-meadow, but, as so often in eastern Gaelic, 'west haugh' and 'east haugh' respectively. He also spoke of the two distinct historical divisions of the area around Aviemore: Strathspey and Badenoch, the former being Grant country, the latter Clan Chattan, including the MacPhersons and the Mackintoshes; and each having its own distinct Gaelic. The boundary between the two ran immediately south of Aviemore, through a hollow known as Slag na Caillich ('hollow of the old woman', with slag being a local variant of lag 'hollow'). The place-name story connected with this name, found elsewhere in the Gaelic world, is that to settle a long-running boundary dispute between Strathspey and Badenoch, two old women set off from each end of the respective territories, with the general agreement that where they met the boundary would be fixed: and they met in Slag na Caillich!
The next paper was by Ian Mitchell, author of Scotland's Mountains before the Mountaineers (Edinburgh 1998). Entitled Scotland's mountain names - the view from Pont, he examined representative examples of Pont's depiction and naming of some of the 350 hills to be found in Pont's manuscript maps. More details of this, and the few earlier references to Highland hills in Scots sources before Pont, can be found in Mitchell's chapter 'Pont and Scotland's Mountains' in the recently published and finely illustrated The Nation Survey'd: Timothy Pont's Maps of Scotland, ed. I. C. Cunningham (East Linton, 2001), pp. 93-110.
The third paper was given by one of England's leading toponymists, Dr Margaret Gelling, who, apart from all her other scholarly achievements, has more than anyone else got place-name scholars out of the library and into the landscape. The theme of her paper was that the topographic vocabulary of the early Anglo-Saxon settlers was highly nuanced and exact, and conveyed information not only about height and shape, for example, but also about potential for settlement and exploitation. The research which she and her colleague Anne Cole have carried out, and continue to carry out, in England should be an inspiration and a guiding light to everyone working in toponymics, since there is no suggestion that the Anglo-Saxons were unique in this precise usage of topographic terminology. A summary of her views, with several of the elements which she spoke about at the Aviemore conference, can be found in her chapter 'Place-Names and Landscape', illustrated by Anne Cole, in The Uses of Place-Names (ed. S. Taylor, Edinburgh, 1998), 75-100. A much more wide-ranging treatment can be found in Gelling and Cole's book The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford, 2000).
The next paper was given by Peter Drummond, author of Scottish Hill and Mountain Names (Scottish Mountaineering Trust, 1991), entitled Scottish Mountain Names - the European Connection. His talk focussed on the European connections of Scottish mountain names. Its core was the substance of an article in Scottish Place-Name News no. 8 (Spring 2000), in turn a very condensed version of articles in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal (Scottish Mountaineering Club Journals nos 187-190, for 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 - 'Scottish Hill-names - the Scandinavian/ Irish / English / Outer Mongolian Connection' respectively). He looked at examples of mountain elements from Norse (eg fjall, which fathered fell), Irish (eg beinn, a minor Irish hill-word that made it big in Alba) and Scots (eg law, which began as an Old English word for a burial mound but in Scotland means a big conical hill). He preceded this core with looking at how Robertson in 1869, W J Watson in 1916 (printed in his History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland, 1926), and W. F. H. Nicolaisen in 1976 (in his Scottish Place-Names revised edition 2001) had dealt with hill-names and the European connection. Robertson had devoted 25% of his book to hill-names, but denied any Eurolinks, even Irish! Watson, the great Gaelic scholar, had recognised the Irish connection but also devoted a lot of space to monadh, a word in which he saw links to Breton and beyond in Europe. Nicolaisen recognises the impact of the three Euro-languages on names, but his book does not say much on hill-names bar sliabh.
Pete finished by displaying a table showing just how many Euro-languages seem to have cognates for the Gaelic hill-words torr, maol and meall, monadh and braigh. He also left the audience considering possible links with Mongolian khrebet with the Scots Crib Laws and Gaelic Groban and Cruben hill-names - via other languages' hreben (Slovak), greben (German), grepon (French), kreben (Breton) and crib (Welsh).
Scottish Hill and Mountain Names is available at £9.95 from any good bookseller, or from the author at same price (p&p incl.) from Apt 8, Gartsherne Academy, Academy Place, Coatbridge ML5 3AX
The final paper of the conference was Simon Taylor's Sliabh/Slew in Scottish hill-names: a re-assessment. The element sliabh is found in both Scottish and Irish Gaelic, with a wide variety of interconnecting meanings from a range of high hills, via mountain and upland moor to a species of hill-grass (in the Gaelic of Wester Ross, at least). Of all Scottish hill-name elements it is the most oft-quoted and overworked by historians and archaeologists. It owes its importance chiefly to the pioneering work of Professor W. F. H. Nicolaisen in the 1960s, since when no original work has been done on it. Because there seemed to be so few names with this element in eastern Scotland, Nicolaisen concluded that it belonged to a very early phase of Dalriadic settlement. The dense cluster of sliabh-names in Galloway, especially in the Rhinns of Galloway, led him to conclude that there was a pre-Norse stratum of Gaelic-speakers in that area. There was also the added point that sliabh seemed to mean 'moor' in Scottish Gaelic, as opposed to 'hill or mountain' in Irish, a meaning it seemed to have in the Rhinns as well, showing a closer affinity with Irish usage.
Simon Taylor made four points:
· that there are far more sliabh-names in eastern Scotland than has hitherto been recognised, where it tends to refer to land over 250 metres;
· that in fact the dominant meaning of this element in Scotland, including the Rhinns, was in fact 'moor', 'upland', 'uninhabitable land', which was also one of the meanings of this element in Ireland;
· that it is so concentrated in the Rhinns of Galloway (as well as in western Argyll) because of the emergence of an Irish-sea language community in the later middle ages, strongly influenced by Irish usage, in which sliabh was so common (around 100 place-names in the 6 counties, with the majority in Down, Antrim, Derry and Tyrone);
· (tentatively), the reason why it was a relatively rare place-naming element in central and eastern Scotland, was that it did not have a recognisable Pictish cognate, unlike other more common hill and topographical terms such as beinn, creag, carn, strath, all of which have obvious cognates in Welsh, and therefore probably in Pictish, and all of which are so dominant in Scottish toponymy.
He therefore disputed the fact that sliabh was only coined in the very early period of Gaelic settlement in Scotland, and so could be used as evidence for a pre-Norse (i.e. pre c. 800) settlement of Gaelic-speakers in the Rhinns of Galloway. This cluster of sliabh-names was probably created a considerable time later.
Simon Taylor would like to thank all those who after the Conference brought to his attention other Scottish sliabh-names which he had not known about. This was much appreciated, and will be fully acknowledged in any resulting publication.