Celtic Toponymics in Scotland

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1 <i>word</i> ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Celtic Toponymics in Scotland W. F. H. Nicolaisen To cite this article: W. F. H. Nicolaisen (1977) Celtic Toponymics in Scotland, <i>word</i>, 28:1-2, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 16 Jun Submit your article to this journal Article views: 145 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 26 November 2017, At: 07:31

2 W. R H. NICOLAISEN Celtic Toponymies in Scotland Exactly half a century ago a book was published which, although intermittently unavailable, has been reprinted ever since, not as part of a greedy reprint policy that has given us, over the last decade or two, hundreds of works of doubtful quality and of limited historical interest, but in response to a continuing demand for a volume which, even after fifty years, hardly shows its age and is still our only reliable, extensive, and systematicthough, naturally, not comprehensive-guide to the significance of Celtic place-names in Scotland: William J. Watson's History of the Celtic Place Names of Scotland.! The author, for more than thirty years Professor of Celtic Languages, Literature, History, and Antiquities in the University of Edinburgh, had already in the preceding two decades established himself as the leading authority on this subject whose demanding complexity had led a reviewer of an earlier, pioneering work of Watson's 2 to state with conviction that "it may truly be said that the writer who undertakes to deal with the Celtic place-names of Scotland must undergo no ordinary linguistic and historic training." 3 Watson not only fitted the image of the "learned native Gael" 4 called for to pursue such an undertaking but also put his own methodological principles into practice, convinced that "much of the work actually attempted" to deal with Scotland's Celtic place-names in the past was "sadly lacking in trustworthiness from no other reason than defective method." s His own high standards asked for some of the requirements now basic to all toponymic research: an adequate knowledge of the language(s) concerned, accurate recording of the local-for the Highlands, the native Gaelic-pronunciation, verification of names on the spot or in consultation with reliable local informants, and the use of old written forms.6 For these reasons, and others yet to become apparent, 1 William J. Watson, The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1926). 2 W. J. Watson, Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty (Inverness: Northern Counties Printing and Publishing, 1904). 3 Alexander Macbain, Celtic Review, I ( ), Ibid. s W. J. Watson, "The Study of Highland Place-Names," Celtic Review, I ( ); Ibid., pp

3 118 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN Watson's Celtic Place-Names constitutes a clearly discernible landmark, and the year 1926 undoubtedly a watershed, in the development of placename research in Celtic Scotland, and certain kinds of guesses, inaccuracies, and mistakes politely tolerated or even mildly acceptable, according to some of the better reviews and comments of the time, before the publication of that study, have been judged more severely and deemed unacceptable ever since. Before and after 1926 are two different eras, and it is therefore quite appropriate that 1976 be the year in which the evolution and state of research into the Celtic place-nomenclature of Scotland is given a brief retrospective assessment and in which that nomenclature is reviewed as a source of knowledge, particularly with regard to information about the several Celtic languages in Scotland. Although Watson's work is naturally not without antecedents, it would be misleading and unprofitable to seek the origins of toponymic studies in Celtic Scotland any earlier than the beginnings of systematic and reliable scholarship in the Celtic languages in general and in Scottish Gaelic in particular. A few early nineteenth-century occasional etymologies, fanciful rather than accurate, by antiquaries, 7 historians, s novelists,9 and ecclesiastical contributors to the Statistical Account of Scotland 10 hardly count in this respect, and even certain somewhat later publications exclusively devoted to the study of place-names cannot be spared severe criticism because they utilize toponymic material in the pursuit of preconceived notions, usually in the course of determining the nature and extent of the linguistic varieties of Celtic spoken in Scotland (and beyond). In 1869, James A. Robertson (late Colonel Unattached), for example, claimed with an exaggerated lack of modesty that, "among the points proved in this work by the Gaelic topography of Scotland is the origin of the author's fellow-countrymen, the Highlanders, that they are undoubtedly the descendants and representatives of the valiant Caledonian Gael, who were the first inhabitants of the land of Alban, now called Scotland, and were 7 For example, George Chalmers, Caledonia: or, An Account, historical and topographic, of North Britain; from the most ancient to the present times: with a Dictionary of Places, Chorographical and Philological. In Four Volumes (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies), vol. I: 1807, vol. 11: 1810, and vol. Ill: 1824; the promised dictionary volume was never published. 8 See, for instance, W. F. Skene, The Highlanders of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1836). 9 The most extreme, but also the best and most illuminating, example is probably Sir Waiter Scott's novel The Antiquary. IO Sir John Sinclair, ed., The Statistical Account of Scotland Drawn up from the Communications of the Ministers of the Different Parishes, 21 vols. (Edinburgh: William Creech, ).

4 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 119 so also of England." 11 Such self-assured pronouncement consequentially leads to the further, not less self-congratulatory, statement: "The writer believes he has fully refuted the fiction of there being a 'Kymric Element' in the topography of Scotland." 12 How has he proved this? The Pictish Aberdeen is explained as Gaelic Abhir-reidh-an 'the smooth river confluence', in which impossible compound an is taken to be a contraction of abhuinn or auin; Ardtornish, which is a Norse name with a prefixed pleonastic Gaelic generic, becomes Gaelic Ard-thor-n'eas 'the high cliff of the cascade'; and Bere in Dorset (!) is claimed to be Gaelic bior 'water'. These are only three examples, but they are quite representative, and each one of them smacks of the prejudicial approach determined to prove oneself right. How strongly such views clash with Kuno Meyer's equally forthright (but even in its extreme metaphor convincing) dictum: "no Gael ever set foot on British soil save from a vessel that had put out from Ireland." 13 It is indeed not surprising, and certainly salutary for the young science of Celtic onomastics, that, like Meyer, the best Celticists of the age Stokes, Thurneysen, Windisch, and so on-took a keen interest in the exploitation of name evidence for the purposes of elucidating Celtic linguistic history and therefore effectively influenced the early shaping of its methodology. It is equally gratifying to note how the best Gaelic scholars of Scotland, in that period, consciously tried to stay abreast of international scholarship without abandoning, indeed by enriching their knowledge thus gained, by a strong concern for and detailed acquaintance with their native tongue and culture. Macbain's anguished challenge that "it has only been too painfully evident of late years that only a learned native Gael-or a German!-can really deal with the Celtic names of Scotland" may have been deliberately provocative in the otherwise very positive context in which it was uttered.1 4 Nevertheless, it illustrates nicely the obvious awareness on Macbain's part of the need for speakers of Scottish Gaelic to step out of the limited provincial framework of their thinking into less confined avenues of thought. Again and again this Inverness schoolmaster, while insisting on a thorough grounding in Gaelic for all those involving themselves in the study of Celtic onomastics in Scotland, laments the easy deterioration of the study of names into mere popular 11 James A. Robertson, The Gaelic Topography of Scotland and What it Proves Explained; with much Historical, Antiquarian, and Descriptive Information (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1869), p. iv. 12 Ibid., p. V. 13 Quoted by W. J. Watson, "The Position of Gaelic in Scotland," Celtic Review, X ( ), 71, and Celtic Place-Names, pp. ix-x. 14 Celtic Review, I ( ), 90; review of Watson, Ross and Cromarty.

5 120 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN and unsystematic etymologizing on the part of many native speakers: "Almost any Highlander will rap you out with his sneeshan the etymology of any place-name or word that comes up in discussion. But this is not science." 1 5 A look at the published expression of that "mania for etymologising" 16 confirms Macbain's judgement only too well, insofar as what were at the time name lists reduced to word lists are now not even that, since many of such (usually only vaguely localized) lists were compiled without a sound knowledge of Gaelic and the eager desire to explain everything in terms of the Gaelic lexicon, frequently with the aid of defective dictionaries. 17 It is against this kind of background, in which names were eagerly interpreted as lexical items in the restricted, and often misleading, context of the Gaelic vocabulary, that one must depict and appreciate the work and achievements of the three great predecessors to Watson, or the "new school", as they have sometimes been called1 8 -Dr. Alexander Cameron ofbrodick, Professor Donald Mackinnon of Edinburgh, and Dr. Alexander Macbain of Inverness, the first and the last both natives of Badenoch, Inverness-shire, and the second, Professor Mackinnon, from the island of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides. Of these three, the eldest, Dr. Cameron ( ), has generally been acknowledged to have provided "among other services, the first scientific treatment of Scottish names of places," 1 9 while for Professor Mackinnon ( ) the well substantiated claim was made that "within a certain range... [he] was undoubtedly the most learned and accurate Gaelic scholar that Scotland has yet [1914] produced." 2 0 Of Alexander Macbain ( ), Watson said in his obituary that he had "laid the foundation of the study of Celtic place-names [in Scotland]," and that he had done "much to reduce the study of Norse Gaelic names to scientific accuracy." 21 For all three, the study of names 15 Alexander Macbain, "Who were the Picts? A Criticism of the Views of Professor Rhys," Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club, IV ( ), Ibid. 17 Apart from Robertson (seen. 11 above), a good example of this type of work would be Alexander Mackenzie's "Local Topography," Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, I ( ), 23-31, or "The Gaelic Origin of Local Names," Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club, Ill ( ), 9-18; or D. Matheson's "Celtic Place Names", ibid., James B. Johnston's Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1892) also suffers from the same fault, as far as its "Gaelic" names are concerned. There are, of course, numerous other illustrations of this tendency. ts Donald Maclean, "Donald Mackinnon, M.A., Emeritus-Professor of Celtic, University of Edinburgh," Celtic Review, X ( ), Watson, "Highland Place-Names," p Donald Lamont, "Professor Mackinnon," Celtic Review, X ( ), W. J. Watson, "Alexander Macbain, LL.D.," Celtic Review, Ill (1906-7), 386.

6 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 121 was an integral part of their scholarly pursuits in the field of Scottish Gaelic, and of Celtic in general, and their onomastic researches clearly benefited from their wide range of knowledge concerning Gaelic language, literature, and antiquities. Fortunately for us, their toponymic interests and subsequent achievements lay in different geographical areas of Scotland. Cameron particularly investigated the place-names of Dunbartonshire 22 and of the island of Arran ;23 Mackinnon gave special, almost exclusive attention to his native county of Argyll ;24 and Macbain took his materials chiefly from Inverness-shire, Sutherland, and the island of Lewis. 25 Naturally, the modern researcher would prefer them to have spread themselves even further geographically at a time when Gaelic was still so much more extensively spoken, but it is probably more sensibly realistic to be grateful for what this amazing trio has done despite the comparatively narrow geographical coverage. Here are the solid foundations of Celtic placename scholarship in Scotland; here are the stimuli which lead straight to Watson. It would, however, be distorting the picture of these initial stages of Scottish place-name research proper if one were to view them simply as a combination of native talent and largely continental academic leadership. Applicable as this may have been (to a degree) to Macbain, the other two, and others besides them, never concealed their admiration for, and direct stimulation by, that great Irish scholar, P. W. Joyce ( ), the first series of whose studies in The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places was published in 1869, with a second series following in It is, in fact, difficult to overestimate Joyce's influence on these early Scottish name scholars. Mackinnon speaks of "Dr. Joyce's admirable work",27 while Cameron calls his studies "by far the ablest work on topography that I have ever seen" 28 and points out that "a reviewer il) the Scotsman said that 22 Alexander Cameron, "Place-Names of Dumbarton," lecture delivered in 1872 or 1873; published in Reliquiae Celticae, ed. Alexander Macbain and John Kennedy, Vol. II (Inverness: Northern Counties Newspaper and Printing and Publishing, 1894), Alexander Cameron, "Arran Place Names," ibid., Mackinnon contributed seventeen articles on "Place Names and Personal Names in Argyle" to The Scotsman between November 9, 1887, and January 18, Several bibliographical references which claim that these articles began in October, 1887, and that there were eighteen of them are wrong. 25 Anthologized handily in Alex. Macbain, Place Names Highlands & Islands of Scotland, ed. William J. Watson (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1922). 26 P. W. Joyce, The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places, first series (Dublin: McGlashan & Gill, 1869); second series (ibid., 1875). A third volume followed in The Scotsman, Nov. 25, 1887, p Cameron, "Place-Names of Dumbarton," p. 548.

7 122 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN it shqllld form an era in the study of topography." 2 9 Less successful students of Scottish place-names in this early period also endeavored to follow Joyce's example. In 1891, James Macdonald, whose own performance in toponymic research did not always match his, for his day, very sound views on the subject, deferred to "Dr. Joyce's opinion",3 and Sir Herbert Maxwell, fascinated by the work of Joyce, as well as of Reeves and O'Donovan in Ireland, explained in 1887 that the collection of materials presented in his Topography of Galloway "was suggested some years ago by the perusal of an early edition of Dr. Joyce's Irish Names of Places," 31 while a few years later, in the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology for 1893, he attempted to emulate for Scotland, with limited success, "what the late Dr. Reeves and Dr. Joyce have done for the place-names of Ireland, Canon Isaac Taylor has done for those of England, and Mr. A. W. Moore for those of the Isle of Man." 32 Joyce, who was perhaps not the father of Scottish toponymies but can certainly be called its godfather, not only provided an acceptable methodological model for his Scottish disciples but also, in his publications, supplied them with welcome parallel names and analogues from Ireland that formed a frame of reference which had been almost totally lacking so far and which, in a way, formed the substance out of which the study of Celtic, especially Gaelic, place-names in Scotland effectively grew. Comparisons between Scottish and Irish place-names became possible and, in the best minds, equivalents in both countries and the identity of naming which these implied were creatively utilized. According to Cameron, Joyce's work "is of greatest interest to the student of Scottish topography, from the fact that very many of the names of places irt Scotland, and especially in Argyllshire and the west of Scotland, are identical with many of the Irish names of places," 33 and Mackinnon, too, affirmed that "Argyleshire names, in so far as they are Gaelic, are in large measure identical with Irish names." 34 Judiciously employed, the Irish crossreference became a fertile factor in toponymic research in the Scottish Gaidhealtachd. Wrongly interpreted, it led to extreme and unjustifiable conclusions, as when Sir Herbert Maxwell, while rightly recognizing that 29 Ibid. 30 James Macdonald, Place Names in Strathbogie, with Notes Historical, Antiquarian, and Descriptive (Aberdeen: D. Wyllie & Son, 1891), p Sir Herbert Eustace Maxwell, Studies in the Topography of Galloway (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887), p. ix. 32 Sir Herbert Maxwell, Scottish Land-Names: Their Origin and Meaning (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1894), p. v. 33 Cameron, "Place-Names of Dumbarton," p The Scotsman, Nov. 25, 1887, p. 5.

8 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 123 "there are innumerable places in Ireland bearing the same names as places in Galloway and other Goidhelic districts of Scotland," 3 5 misunderstood the nature and overestimated the extent of "Irish", as opposed to "Scottish", Gaelic names in the Scottish Southwest, and erroneously supposed that, in Galloway anyhow, "a dialect of Gaelic or Erse was spoken from the first advent of the Celts down to the time when it was superseded by Northern English".36 As will be shown later,37 the connections of the earliest Gaelic place-names in Galloway with Ireland are certainly very close and such names are probably earlier than had for a long time been assumed, but this does not turn them into the earliest traces of a Celtic linguistic presence in that part of Scotland, nor do their roots in Common Gaelic naming principles and practices in a similar landscape make them expressly Irish. Outside models and influences apart, what impresses one perhaps more than anything else with these early pioneers of the onomastic sciences in Scotland (and they had a considerable interest in personal names, too!) is their awareness of, and insistence on, using "scientific" method in investigating names as more than just linguistic items, a sound view which made James Macdonald speak with disdain of those who regard place-names "merely as etymological puzzles." 38 This also made Donald Mackinnon begin his series of seventeen newspaper articles on Place Names and Personal Names in Argyle with the positive and imaginative statement: "The names of places and peoples of a country, when understood and read aright, supply one of the largest and most reliable chapters in the history of the people." 39 The emphasis is here just as much on the nature of placenames as historical evidence as on the ways in which they can be "understood and read aright". This latter requirement is a desideratum which even today is often neglected but which was never far from the minds of these early pioneers whose views in this respect have a surprisingly modern ring. "To interpret the old names of places is often no easy task," said Dr. Cameron of Brodick as early as 1872 or "Many of those names have been handed down to us in a form very different from that in which they originally existed, and many of them no longer exist in the living language ofthe people. It requires, therefore, much careful study 35 Maxwell, Topography of Galloway, Ibid., p Seep. 135 below. 38 James Macdonald, "On the Study of Celtic Place Names," Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club, Ill ( ), 423. Ironically, this is the same volume in which Mackenzie's and Matheson's highly etymologizing articles were published (see n. 17 above). 39 The Scotsman, Nov. 9, 1887, p. 7.

9 124 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN of ancient documents, as well as of existing traditions and of natural features and characteristics of the places to make some approximation to an accurate interpretation of their names." 40 Or elsewhere: "There is nothing in the world more easy than to discover a meaning for almost any place-name; but we must remember that interpretations based upon a mere resemblance in sound between words, or parts of words, is of no value whatever in the accurate study of topography... It is better to confess our inability to explain a word than to mislead, by giving an inaccurate explanation, and when a matter is doubtful, it ought to be given as doubtful. This is the surest way of attaining at least to certainty." 41 How one wishes that such a systematic approach and intelligent caution were the rule rather than the exception even today, just as one should like Donald Mackinnon's commonsense plea to have been heeded by all those who came after him, and not just by a few: "Among the linguistic requisites for the elucidation of these names, the foremost is to ascertain the oldest form of the word. In the case of Gaelic names, it is almost equally necessary to get the exact pronunciation at the present day." 42 How much better off we would be if, for example, the only Scottish place-name dictionary in existence, first published in 1892 and, after two revised editions in 1903 and 1934, reprinted as late as this decade, 4 3 had benefited from such sage advice instead of joining the longish bibliographical list of place-name publications which have relied solely on the printed map spelling, usually reflecting an Anglicized version. Inadequate linguistic knowledge on the part of the field surveyor (and there are many fewer cases of this than is popularly assumed, almost in a kind of "Ordnance Survey Folklore") is no excuse for a repetition of such inadequacies on the part of the place-name scholar. Undeniably, and naturally, the major preoccupation of this group of three pioneers and of their less well equipped and less effective contemporaries was the elucidation of the Gaelic names of Scotland, or-put somewhat differently-the recovery of the lexical meaning of these names through the scrutiny of their early written forms, the recording of their present-day pronunciation, and the inspection of the locale or feature named. Indeed, for most place-name researchers, or shall we say, place-name enthusiasts, this was the main (perhaps the only) purpose of toponymic studies. Once, in Macdonald's terms, the Gaelic "etymological puzzle" had been solved 40 Cameron, "Place-Names of Dumbarton," p Cameron, "Arran Place Names," p The Scotsman, Nov. 17, 1887, p James B. Johnston, Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1892); 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1903); 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1934).

10 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 125 more or less satisfactorily, the work could be regarded as having been successfully completed. There were, however, another two linguistic peoples, known to have lived in Scotland in historical or prehistoric times, in whose place-names Gaelic scholars showed a considerable interest from the very beginning of their involvement in onomastic studies: the Picts and the Norse. For the former, it was their linguistic affinities-gaelic, non-gaelic Celtic, or non-celtic-on which place-names were expected to throw some light; for the latter, their sociocultural relationship to the Gaels of the Hebrides and of the adjacent Scottish mainland was hoped to yield some of its secrets through a thorough examination of Scandinavian place-names in these parts of Scotland. Of the three scholars who so centrally and decisively dominated the infancy of Celtic toponymies in Scotland, Macbain was undoubtedly the one who became most involved in the Pictish controversy, displaying much vigour and passion in his verbal frays, mainly with Skene, who took the Picts to be Goidels,44 and Rhys, in whose opinion the Picts were non Celtic.45 Macbain's own view was-and this is one which has been sustained and reinforced ever since, despite some minority opinions to the contrary46-that "Pictish was a language akin to Welsh and not to Gaelic," 4 7 a fact for which, as he saw it, "the names of places in Pictland, ancient and modern, form the strongest link in our chain of proof." 48 The place-names which he particularly had in mind were the names of watercourses and, above all ("the greatest burden ofproof"),4 9 settlement names beginning with Aber- and Pit- (earlier Pet-), like Aberdeen and Aberfoyle, Pitfour, Pitalmit, and Pittagowan. In this stance, as well as in the evaluation of appropriate place-name evidence, he received strong support from Whitley Stokes, who regarded Macbain's views of the linguistic locus of Pictish as "the true hypothesis." so Quite clearly, even at this early stage, 44 Skene, Highlanders, Skene's views are discussed by Alexander Macbain, "Mr Skene versus Dr Skene," Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, XXI ( ), JohnRhys, "The Inscriptions and Language of the NorthernPicts," Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, XXVI ( ), , with some "Addenda and Corrigenda," ibid., XXVII ( ), While relating Pictish to Basque in this article, Rhys later abandons this view in "A Revised Account of the Northern Picts," ibid., XXXII ( ), The non-celtic theory was supported by MacNeill and Macalister, and the equation of Gaelic and Pictish was continued by Diack, and less radically by Fraser. Their views are neatly summarized and refuted by K. H. Jackson, "The Pictish Language," The Problem of the Picts, ed. F. T. Wainwright (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1955), pp Macbain, "Who Were the Picts?", p Ibid. 49 Ibid., p Whitley Stokes, "On the Linguistic Value of the Irish Annals," Proceedings of the

11 126 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN place-names had become invaluable as a source of information concerning the Pictish question, and Thurneysen's demonstration of the Celtic origin of the Romance term pezza in Diez's Etymologisches Worterbuch der romanischen Sprachen and of its links not only with Breton pez 'a piece' and Welsh and Cornish peth 'a part, a thing, something', but also with pett in the Book of Deer and with Old Irish cuit, Gaelic cuid 'part, portion' 51 had increased the value especially of Pit-names even more, in this respect. Of the other two pioneers, commensurate with their geographical emphasis, Cameron (Dumbartonshire and Arran) acknowledged "British or Cymric" to have been one of the "three great elements" of the topography of Scotland, 52 and Mackinnon saw the linguistic stratification of his county nomenclature (Argyllshire), with a few exceptions, as "Gaelic, with a considerable sprinkling of Norse, and in recent times a growing number of English names." 53 All three-cameron, Mackinnon and Macbain-had a keen interest in the Norse place-names of the areas of their choice, either treating them incidentally, as in Cameron's Arran Place Names, or more extensively: Mackinnon devoted two of his seventeen articles on Argyllshire names to "The Norse Element," 54 and Macbain, in addition to his essay on "The Place Names of the Hebrides," 55 which is to a large extent a treatise on the Norse names of the Western Isles, read a paper on Norse elements in Highland place-names to the Gaelic Society of Inverness in In this aspect of their work, both Mackinnon and Macbain relied heavily on earlier researches conducted by Captain F. W. L. Thomas, R.N., who had made public his results in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for and The acceptable as well as the less Philological Society, 1890, pp This article is reprinted in Beitriige zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen, XVIII (1892), R. Thurneysen, Keltoromanisches (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1884), pp Cameron, "Place-Names of Dumbarton," p The Scotsman, Nov. 17, 1887, p The Scotsman, Dec. 2, 1887, p. 5, and Dec. 7, 1887, p Macbain, Highlands & Islands, pp Published as "The Norse Element in the Topography of the Highland and Isles," Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, IX ( ), This article largely overlaps in wording and substance with the previous one. 57 "Did the Northmen Extirpate the Celtic Inhabitants of the Hebrides in the Ninth Century?',' Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, XI (1876), "On Islay Place-Names," ibid., XVI (1882), Capt. Thomas acknowledges extensive help from Hector Maclean of Islay, who appears to have been the competent advisor of a number of scholars, not just in place-name studies. See J. H. Delargy, "Three Men of Islay," Scottish Studies, IV (1960), , and Mackinnon, "Hector Maclean, M.A.I.," Celtic Monthly, I ( ), Maclean ( ) contributed

12 CELTIC TOPONYMies IN SCOTLAND 127 satisfactory etymologies and conclusions of their predecessor have therefore crept into Mackinnon's and Macbain's publications and have thus perpetuated, amongst other things, grossly misleading percentage figures, with respect to the proportions of Norse to Gaelic names in Lewis, Islay, and Arran. 59 Since so much depends on the level on which such percentage counts are made and since it is never possible to get hold of all the names current in a community at any given time, such figures not only mean very little but are practically invalid for historical investigations and, because of their somewhat haphazard selection, cannot be employed in estimating the respective sizes of the population groups who coined or used these names. For these reasons, the actual figures suggested are better left unmentioned in the present context. On the whole, our pioneers concerned themselves mainly with a mere examination of the toponymic footprints of the Scandinavians, with the major generics involved in the morphological makeup of such names, and with their, mostly phonological, fate after passing into Gaelic and finally into English. Apart from Macbain's discussion of Gaelic airigh 'shieling' in Norse place-names, 6o in which cogent arguments were advanced for the borrowing of this term by the Norsemen in the Hebrides, the social and chronological relationship of the two placenomenclatures, Norse and Gaelic, were hardly ever touched upon. An exception is Macbain's statement at the end of his treatment of the Norse names in the Hebrides putting forward the claim that all the Gaelic names in the Long Island "are importations since the re-occupation of the Islands by the Gael on the fall of the Norse power." 61 In such an extreme formulation, this claim is indubitably an overstatement of the real situation and partly caused by the comparative inability to isolate Gaelic placename generics which are likely to have been pre-norse (c. A.D ). Even today, however, there is not much evidence which would force or help us to qualify Macbain's assertion to any significant extent. Certainly the title of George Henderson's volume devoted to a full study of the Norse influence on Celtic Scotland62 seems to indicate that, as late as 1910, it was assumed that the general cultural traffic, inclusive of its linguistic and onoan article on "The Picts" to the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, XVI ), , in which he subscribes to the view that they were pre-celtic. 59 Macbain, "Place-Names of the Hebrides," 70 and Mackinnon, The Scotsman, Dec. 2, 1887, p Macbain, Highlands and Islands, pp Macbain, "Place-Names of the Hebrides," p George Henderson, The Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1910).

13 128 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN mastic components, had been chiefly one way-but had it? What we know of the bilingual communities, in which Gaelic and English are the two languages in contact, appears to contradict such an assumption up to a point, although an equal amount of give and take is not to be expected under such conditions because the Kulturgefiille is almost always in one direction, determining which, on the whole, is to be the onomastic donor language and which the receptor. There is, by the way, in these early days of Celto-centric place-name research very little mention of contemporary bilingual, or rather bicultural, communities in which onomastic behavior can be objectively observed in the contact (or clash?) between Gaelic and English nomenclatures. Any Anglicization, whether phonological adaptation, orthographic adjustment, partial or full translation, or tautological lexical addition, is roughly classified under the rubric of "corruption" and treated as such, whereas no such stigma is attached to the frequent Gaelicization of Scandinavian names. In this way, the ethnolinguistic factors which provided the stimulus and the enthusiasm for the systematic, "scientific" study of Celtic place-names by native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in one respect, also supplied the blinkers in another. A further aspect of toponymy which remained in an embryonic stage in those early years was the registration and interpretation of name distribution in a spatial context. Geographical distribution maps were completely lacking then and remained totally absent, or at least scarce, for many decades to come, but even "mental mapping" in the form of name lists indicating the names' geographical location, however vaguely, was rare. Admittedly each examination of a particular generic or name type invokes through the mere listing of examples the principle of spatial distribution. Such illustrative sets of examples are, however, by definition never complete and are frequently selected with characteristics other than distribution in mind, and are nothing more than a very small first step toward the mapping process. There were altogether only two deliberate attempts at compiling lists of Scottish place-names and their elements with the study of their geograppical scatter in mind. Neither came from scholars whose primary training had been linguistic: one was a historian and the other an archaeologist. Dr. W. F. Skene's table of the distribution of place-name generics in Scotland,63 based on the so-called Retours,64 for instance, listed 264 names beginning with Pit-, 16 names with Pitten-, and 35 with 63 W. F. Skene, "Race and Language of the Picts," Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd series, XI (1865), facing p lnquisitionum ad Capellam Domini Regis Retornatarum, quae in publicis archivis Scotiae adhuc servantur, Abbrevatio, ed. T. Thomson (London: House of Commons, ), 3 vols.

14 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 129 Pet-, a total of 315 names regarded by its compiler as Pictish, whereas in the only other distributional study 6 5 the Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Mr. David Christison, had extracted relevant names from the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps for an examination of twenty-three generics, seven of them Celtic [Ben, Pen, Pin, Bar(r), Kame(s) etc., Bal, and Pet/Pit]. At least the first five of these formed a useful counterweight to Dr. Skene's tables which, because of the nature of the documentary evidence on which they were based, exclusively contained names and name elements which applied to human settlements. In terms of its own period, Christison's presentation is an astonishingly well informed and progressive piece of work that purposefully shuns the prevalent preoccupation with meaning and derivation ; 66 it is, in other ways also, a typical product of its time, insofar as, after wisely counseling (with a reference top. W. Joyce!) that "the proportion of the Scandinavian element in Scottish place-names is also well worth working out," 67 the author speculates that, "if the infusion of Norse blood, particularly in the Highlands, may be gauged by the considerable number of Scandinavian placenames, the differentiation of the Highland from the Irish and Welsh Celt may be partially explained, and especially his capacity to rise to military service... " 6 8 (No comment.) It is, however, salutary to note that the five "modern pioneer works on Scottish place-names" which Christison particularly singled out in 1893 are Sir Herbert Maxwell's Studies in the Topography of Galloway (1887), the Rev. James B. Johnston's Place-Names of Scotland (1892), Professor Mackinnon's The Place-Names of Argyleshire ( ; "a work unfortunately confined as yet to the columns of The Scotsman newspaper," where unfortunately it still lies buried and almost inaccessible today), 6 9 James Macdonald's Place-Names in Strathbogie (1891), and "Remarks on Place-Names" in Dr. Skene's Race and Language of the Picts (1865). It is not easy to condemn certain shortcomings in other toponymic publications when these are the pioneer works as evaluated by, and available to, an interested contemporary (Mackinnon's series of articles always excepted, of course). That against the background of these efforts of the 1880s and 1890s 65 David Christison, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, XXVII ( ), Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., pp Whereas The Place-Names of Argyll by H. Cameron Gillies (London: D. Nutt, 1906) is on most library shelves. Reviewing it, Mackinnon said: "We close the book with a profound feeling of disappointment" (Celtic Review, Ill [1906-7], 94); and Macbain, after dealing extensively with its many defects, ends his review on a note of despair: "They are not all that we... could point out, but, as Mercutio says, "Tis enough'" (Highlands & Islands, p. 357).

15 130 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN W. J. Watson's ( ) first sizeable publication, his Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty, 7 0 must have seemed like both a culmination and a revelation is understandable. His Prefacen echoed Cameron, Mackinnon, and Macbain, but in more finely honed language and argumentation, and the continued indebtedness top. W. Joyce is also there.n The account of his method, his counsel to potential students of place-names, especially regarding Gaelic names, and his treatment of the linguistic complexity of the toponymic evidence were paralleled by similar accounts, counsel, and treatments in his article on "The Study of Highland Place-Names" published almost simultaneously in the Celtic Review,?~ which, over the next twelve years, became the main platform for the publication of his name studies. Since Watson's ideas as to method and other requirements have already been incorporated in the introductory paragraph of this article, 74 they need not be reiterated here in detail. It well bears repeating, however, that in his study of the place-names of his native county everything had gone into its preparation that is still demanded of similar studies more than seventy years later: attention to the local pronunciation, an excellent knowledge of Gaelic, as well as of Norse and English and of other potential Celtic languages (i.e., of the languages involved in the creation of the county nomenclature), extraction of early name spellings from appropriate documents, familiarity with equivalent names in Ireland and in Scandinavia, and a reasonable attempt at localization. Most of Watson's etymologies are plausible and restrained, speculation is kept to an imaginative minimum, and the only flaws are of a technical nature and only recognizable with the help of the kind of hindsight available seven decades later-lack of reference to the documents in which the spellings quoted occur, and complete omission of any record of the pronunciation. Otherwise, this volume is still in many ways a model study. No wonder the reviews were ecstatic ps Watson's Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty was, nevertheless, still within the traditional coverage of a Highland county-but the road was now open for bigger things. In 1914, Watson, the Rector of Inverness Royal Academy, succeeded Donald Mackinnon in the Chair of Celtic in 70 See n. 2 above. 71 On Jan. 12, 1904, Watson read a summary of sections of this Preface to the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club. His conclusions were printed under the title "Study of Scottish Place-Names" in the Transactions, VI ( ), Watson, Ross and Cromarty, p. XXX. 73 See no. 5 above. 74 P. HI, quoting from "The Study of Highland Place-Names." 75 See, for instance, Macbain, Highlands & Islands, ; first published in Celtic Review, I ( ),

16 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 131 the University of Edinburgh. On October 13 of that year he delivered his inaugural address on "The Position of Gaelic in Scotland"; in 1916 he gave the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, six lectures which formed the nucleus of the book, the fiftieth anniversary of whose publication this year suggested the idea for this article: The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland. How students of the subject ever managed without it is difficult to imagine. One is still at a loss today if a certain name is not included in "Watson" or only referred to without a derivation. Watson's Celtic Place-Names combined the best work of his predecessors with a large amount of what was new and had never been treated before. This is especially true of the chapters presenting "general surveys" of Scotland south of Forth and Clyde (Lothian, Dumfries and Galloway, Ayrshire and Strathclyde), those dealing with British and British Gaelic names, and those devoted to river names. One may not always agree with Watson's individual derivations, one may even detect minor flaws like the inclusion of two derivations for the same name, 76 or one may differ with him over some generalizations like the claim that Gaelic sliabh in the sense of 'mountain' is common in Ireland but very rare in Scotland and does not seem to occur in Galloway,77 but it would indeed be narrowminded and churlish to allow such minor criticism to detract from the very real merits of a work which treats more than 3,000 Scottish place-names of Celtic origin, most of them in considerable detail (and in various contexts, since it is, of course, no dictionary). For the first time, not only the Pictish names of the Scottish northeast but also the British names of Strathclyde receive attention to the same extent as Gaelic names. Within each linguistic stratum the organization is chiefly morphological, through the discussion of toponymic elements, whether derivational or compositional; in fact, derivation through suffixes as a morphological principle in Celtic name formation in Scotland did receive here its first competent treatment, 78 after having previously suffered neglect in favor of composition, a mode of formation much more applicable to the younger strata of Celtic, especially Gaelic, place nomenclature, than to its older layers. If Watson's magnum opus had simply been a brilliant summary of the achievements of previous research into the Celtic place-names of Scotland, with a few additional personal touches perhaps, it would still have been an 76 Loch Lomond, on pp. 119 and Watson, Celtic Place-Names, p Francis C. Diack did, of course, also rely heavily on the evidence of suffixes in his bid to prove that Pictish was Goidelic, but his morphological analyses in this respect seldom inspire confidence. See Revue Celtique, XXXVIII ( ), ; XXXIX (1922), ; and XLI (1924),

17 132 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN outstanding work, but an essentially backward looking one and therefore unlikely to survive and to have an impact for half a century or more. What has guaranteed its longevity and its continued value as a basic textbook is the fact that, being so much more than just a Scottish equivalent or imitation of P. W. Joyce, it must have been at least twenty years ahead of its time in 1926, and at least a scholarly generation ahead in its Rhind Lecture version of No wonder, then, that, at least until his retirement in 1938 (maybe even until his death in 1948), Watson himself remained the dominant figure in, and set the standards for, the study of Scottish place-names of Celtic provenance, mainly through the systematic exploration of the names of Perthshire. 79 Two events marked the beginning of what may be termed the post Watson era: the appointment of Professor Kenneth H. Jackson as the fifth incumbent of the Edinburgh Chair of Celtic in 1949, and the creation of the Scottish Place-Name Survey as part of the School of Scottish Studies on whose Advisory Committee Professor Jackson has served since the School's inception in It is, of course, especially appropriate and gratifying that Professor Jackson and the University of Edinburgh have in this manner followed and continued into our own time the traditions shaped by the first two professors of Celtic, Donald Mackinnon and William J. Watson, spanning a combined period of service of well over fifty years ( ), and that Edinburgh should consequently still be the Scottish centre of Celtic toponymic research. Jackson, for whom the evidence provided by place-names has, in general, served to illuminate other spheres of learning-phonology, lexicography, philology, history, prehistory, literature, folklore-has brought to Celtic name studies in Scotland a demanding precision which has lifted their interpretation once and for all out of the realms of speculative etymology. This has notably put research into the p-celtic names of Scotland, those of the Cumbrians and those of the Picts, onto a level never attempted, and certainly not achieved, before. His painstaking examination of the various recorded forms of the name Edinburgh, for example, so has finally put a stop 79 William J. Watson, "Place-Names of Strathdeam," Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, XXX ( ), ; "The Place-Names of Breadalbane," ibid., XXXIV ( ), ; "Place-Names ofperthshire: The Lyon Basin," ibid., XXXV ( ), ; but also "The Celts in Britain," ibid., XXXVI ( ), , and "The Celts (British and Gael) in Dumfriesshire and Galloway," Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History & Antiquarian Society; 3rd series, XI ( ), so K. H. Jackson, "Edinburgh and the Anglian Occupation of the Lothian," The Anglo-Saxons, Studies... Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959), pp ,

18 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 133 to the popular etymology which has explained it as 'Edwin's fortress' ever since the twelfth century; and the onomastic material illustrating the history of the Britons of Southern Scotland and their relationship to the Angles has been presented with conviction and clarity on a number of occasions. si Similarly, the linguistic affinities of the Ianguage(s) of the Picts and the nature and extent of their settlement area have received their definitive treatment from Jackson, 82 who, in the course of his argumentation, not only used place-name evidence extensively but also made the distribution of Celtic place-names in Scotland visible for the first time by showing the location of place-names beginning with Pit- and other place-name elements of p-celtic origin (carden, lanerc, pert, pevr, aber) on two maps,s3 an amazingly late date for an "innovation" of this kind. Anyone wishing to review the various opinions expressed with regard to the language of the Picts since, let us say, the middle of the last century can do no better than read Jackson's account of, and comments on, them. One may wish to see Pictish interpreted as somewhat less different from Cumbric and the rest of insular p-celtic than Jackson would argue, 84 but that would be a modification not intended to undermine the whole argument. Nobody will, one hopes, ever be able to claim again that the Celtic ingredient of Pictish was not of the p-celtic variety, and there is also no reason why the distribution of names beginning with Pit- (<Pet-) should not continue to be the definitive indication of the settlement area of these Celtic Picts, even if most of the specifics, or second elements, in such names are demonstrably of Gaelic and not of Pictish origin, a fact which places the majority of them not earlier than A.D. 800 and therefore not in the Pictish period proper. ss As one has come to expect, Jackson managed to squeeze the last drop of relevant linguistic information out of the place-name evidence, a technique which he has developed to perfection in the use of toponymic material for 81 K. H. Jackson, "The British Language during the Period of the English Settlements," Studies in Early British History, ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge: University Press, 1954), pp ; "The Britons in Southern Scotland," Antiquity, XXIX (1955), 77-88; "The Sources for the Life of St. Kentigern," Studies in the Early British Church, ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge: University Press, 1958), pp ; "On the Northern British Section in Nennius," Celt and Saxon, ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge: University Press, 1963), pp ; "Angles and Britons in Northumbria and Cumbria," Angles and Britons, ed. H. Lewis (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1963), pp See n. 46 above. 83 Jackson, "Pictish Language," pp. 147 and W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "P-Celtic Place-Names in Scotland," Studia Celtica, VII (1972), W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "Place-Names of the Dundee Region," Dundee and District ed. S. J. Jones (Dundee, British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968),

19 134 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN the elucidation of diachronic phonology. Unfortunately, Scotland is only on the fringe of his monumental Language and History in Early Britain, 86 and the study of Scottish place-names does not therefore benefit as much from it as might be desirable; the recent elegant treatment of place-names, as well as of other lexical material, in Jackson's edition of The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer81 makes one yearn more than ever for a historical phonology of the Celtic languages of Scotland, especially of Scottish Gaelic, from his pen. It is worth mentioning parenthetically at this point that place-names have formed an important part of the dialect surveys carried out by a number of Scandinavian scholars in the Hebrides and in some of the Gaelicspeaking areas of the Scottish west coast.88 Not only is their pronunciation accurately recorded but their role in the determination of phonological structure is a fascinating one. Naturally names usually behave like other lexical items and have therefore been treated as such by the authors. There are a few important exceptions, however, whose phonological development one may ascribe to their onomastic rather than their lexical characteristics. The idea of a systematic and comprehensive survey of Scottish placenames, modern as it may seem, is not of recent vintage. As early as 1887, Liddall asked: "Is it too much to hope for that a topographical society should be formed, whose object would be the compilation of a Celtic topographical dictionary of Scotland?" 89 And a few years later Christison suggested that "a general index [of older forms of Scottish place-names] compiled from these sources [Registrum Magni Sigilli, Record of Retours, and similar compendia], with the date at which each name occurs in the references, would be no impossible task for some scientific body or committee to undertake, and would give the study of our place-names a precision and reliability, which without such aid are unattainable".90 The dreams of these two gentlemen, despite some intermittent efforts by the 86 K. H. Jack son, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh: University Press, 1953). 87 Kenneth Jackson, The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer (Cambridge: University Press, 1972). 88 Cart Hj. Borgstmm, The Dialects of the Outer Hebrides, Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap, Suppl. Bind I (Oslo, 1940); The Dialects of Skye and Ross-shire, ibid., 11 (Oslo, 1941); Magne Oftedal. The Gaelic of Leurbost, Isle of Lewis, ibid., IV (Oslo, 1956), with a most informative offshoot in his article "The Village Names of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides," Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap, XVII (1954), ; Nits M. Holmer, The Gaelic of Arran (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1957); and The Gaelic of Kintyre (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962). 89 W. J. N. Liddall, "Kinross-shire Place Names," Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, XIV ( ), Christison, p. 256 (see n. 65 above).

20 CELTIC TOPONYMICS IN SCOTLAND 135 Royal Scottish Geographical Society, did not come true for another sixty years, when the Scottish Place-Name Survey came into existence as an integral part of the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies. The organization, purpose, and activities of the Survey have been described elsewhere91 and cannot form part of this survey, which is primarily concerned with the published results and manifestations of research into the Celtic place-names of Scotland. Fortunately even long-term surveys provide an opportunity for short-term projects and interim, more restricted investigations, the results of which more often than not found their way into a series of "Notes on Scottish Place Names," published regularly in the journal Scottish Studies between 1958 and Several of these thirtytwo "Notes" were concerned with Celtic names. The more important of these concentrated on two main principles or approaches, namely, the distribution of place-names in space and time, rather than on the traditional search for linguistic etymologies and lexical meaning; the chief stressand some may regard this as an overemphasis-was on the extralinguistic potential of names and not on their embeddedness in language. The latter was simply taken for granted and was used as a point of departure, not as the final aim of a study of names as names, and not as mere lexical items. In this vein, for example, the isolation of Gaelic sliabh 'hill, moor' as an early, probably pre-norse, generic in Scottish hill names (Slewfad, Slewlea, Slewmuck; also Slamannan) permitted a peep below the Scandinavian toponymic "blanket" but also aided the discovery of an early Gaelic settlement area in the extreme Scottish southwest, possibly synchronic with the well-known larger settlement of the Scottish Dalriada further north, comprising much of the present-day Argyll.92 This breakthrough has unfortunately remained an exception,93 and the internal chronological stratification of the Gaelic toponymic stratum, reaching back in places for more than 1,400 years, is still largely a closed chapter. Nevertheless, a few additional pointers have been recognized: Names beginning with Ki/ (Gaelic ci/1 'church'), like Kilbride, Kilmacolm, Kilmarnock, Kilmartin, 91 W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "The Collection and Transcription of Scottish Place-Names," Atti e Memorie del VII Congresso lnternazionale di Scienze Onomastiche (Florence, 1961), IV (Florence: Istituto di Glottologia, 1963), W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "Scottish Place-Names: 24. Slew- and sliabh," Scottish Studies, IX (1965), This article develops in detail ideas suggested by John MacQueen, "Welsh and Gaelic in Galloway," Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History & Antiquarian Society, 3rd series, XXXII ( ), 77-92, esp Most Gaelic toponymic generics seem to have been used throughout the many centuries in which speakers of Gaelic created place-names in Scotland. MacQueen, "Welsh and Gaelic," p. 90, suggests a further early element: Gaelic carraig 'rock, cliff'.

21 136 W. F. H. NICOLAISEN form another fairly early group, especially south of the Forth-Clyde line,94 and even the distribution patterns of the most common Gaelic generics used in names of human habitations, baile 'town, village, farm' (Balbeg, Baldoon, Balmaclellan, Baltersan) and achadh 'field' (Auchencairn, Auchinleck, Auchnotteroch, Auchans), can be exploited as sources of information regarding the extent and evolution of the settlement areas of speakers of Gaelic in Scotland. Again, such information is particularly valuable south of the Forth and Clyde, since other sources providing information about Gaelic settlement in the territory of the Cumbric kingdom of Strathclyde are practically nonexistent.95 The distribution of baile-names in the whole of Scotland, on the other hand, has turned out to be a valid visual image of the largest extent to which Gaelic has ever been spoken in Scotland-some time in the early Middle Ages.96 The morphological as well as the semantic structure of Scottish river names97 contain further helpful criteria which can be utilized in the chronological stratification of a linguistic-cumonomastic layer which is decidedly not homogeneous and whose various strands are difficult to unravel. In its time, Scottish Gaelic has obviously had contact with at least four other languages at different stages of its own development: the Celtic languages which we call Pictish and Cumbric, and the Germanic languages known as Norse and English. The closest contact with Pictish must have been in Pictland proper for about two centuries or so after the beginning of the ninth century; its onomastic products are the many place-names beginning with Pit- (Pictish pett 'portion of land') and ending in a Gaelic specific (Pit/ochry, Pitcruive, Pittenweem) which can only be explained through a period of bilingualism and subsequent adoption by Gaelic speakers of the toponymic element, but not the appellative, pett(t) John MacQueen, "Kirk- and Kil- in Galloway Place-Names," ArchivumLinguisticum, VIII (1956), , and W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "Norse Place-Names in South West Scotland," Scottish Studies, IV (1960), 49-70, esp W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "Gaelic Place-Names in Southern Scotland," Studia Celtica, V (1970), See W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "Gaelic Place-Names," An Historical Atlas of Scotland c. 400-c. 1600, ed. Peter McNeill and Ranald Nicholson (St. Andrews: Atlas Committee of the Conference of Scottish Medievalists, 1975), pp. 4-5, and Maps 4a-4d (pp ). 97 W. F. H. Nicolaisen, "The Semantic Structure of Scottish Hydronymy," Scottish Studies, I (1957), , and "The Historical Stratification of Scottish Hydronymy," Sixth International Congress of Onomastic Sciences (Munich: 1958), Reports, Ill (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1961), Despite Watson, Celtic Place-Names, p See Jackson, "Pictish Language," pp. 149, n. 3; Jackson, Book of Deer, p. 115, n. 3; and Nicolaisen, Dundee and District, pp