INTRODUCTION

Among the branches of human speculation that, in recent times, have walked out of the misty realm of conjecture into the firm land of science, and from the silent chamber of the student into the breezy fields of public life, there are few more interesting than Etymology. For as words are the common counters, or coins rather, with which we mark our points in all the business and all the sport of life, any man whose curiosity has not been blunted by familiarity, will naturally find a pleasure in understanding what the image and superscription on these markers mean; and amongst words there are none that so powerfully stimulate this curiosity as the names of persons and places. About these the intelligent interest of young persons is often prominently manifested; and it is a sad thing when parents or teachers, who should be in a position to gratify this interest, are obliged to waive an eager intelligence aside, and by repeated negations to repel the curiosity which they ought to have encouraged. Geography indeed, a subject full of interest to the young mind, has too often been taught in such a way as neither to delight the imagination with vivid pictures, nor to stimulate inquiry by a frequent reference to the history of names; and this is an evil which, if found to a certain extent in all countries, is particularly rank in Great Britain, where the language of the country is composed of fragments of half a dozen languages, which only the learned understand, and which, to the ear of the many, have no more significance than if they were Hebrew or Coptic. The composite structure of our English speech, in fact, tends to conceal from us the natural organism of language; so that in our case, it requires a special training to make us fully aware of the great truth announced by Horne Tooke, that “in language there is nothing arbitrary.” Nevertheless, the curiosity about the meaning of words, though seldom cherished, is not easily extinguished; and, in this age of locomotion, there are few scraps of information more grateful to the intelligent tourist than those which relate to the significance of topographical names. When, for instance, the London holiday-maker, in his trip to the West Highlands, setting foot in one of Mr. Hutchinson’s steamboats at Oban, on his way to the historic horrors of Glencoe, finds on his larboard side a long, low island, green and treeless, called Lismore, he will be pleased, no doubt, at first by simply hearing so euphonious a word in a language that he had been taught to believe was harsh and barbarous, but will be transported into an altogether different region of intelligent delight when he is made to understand that this island is wholly composed of a vein of limestone, found only here in the midst of a wide granitic region skirted with trap; that, by virtue of this limestone, the island, though treeless, is more fertile than the surrounding districts; and that for this reason it has received the Celtic designation of Liosmor, or the great garden. Connected with this etymology, not only is the topographical name made to speak reasonably to a reasonable being, but it contains in its bosom a geological fact, and an œconomical issue, bound together by a bond of association the most natural and the most permanent. The pleasant nature of the intelligence thus awakened leads us naturally to lament that, except to those who are born in Celtic districts and speak the Celtic language, the significance of so many of our most common topographical names in the most interesting districts is practically lost; and it deserves consideration whether, in our English and classical schools, so much at least of the original speech of the country should not be taught as would enable the intelligent student to know the meaning of the local names, to whose parrot-like repetition he must otherwise be condemned.

Some of the Celtic words habitually used in the designation of places—such as Ben, Glen, Strath, and Loch—have been incorporated into the common English tongue; and the addition to this stock is not very large, which would enable an intelligent traveller to hang the points of his picturesque tour on a philological peg that would most materially insure both their distinctness and their permanence. Nay, more; the germ of appreciation thus begotten might lead a sympathetic nature easily into some more serious occupation with the old language of our country; and this might lead to a discovery full of pleasant surprise, that in the domain of words, as of physical growth, the brown moors, when examined, often produce flowers of the most choice beauty with which the flush of the most cultivated gardens cannot compete, and that a venerable branch of the old Indo-European family of languages, generally ignored as rude and unlettered, is rich in a popular poetry, as fervid in passion, and as healthy in hue, as anything that Homer or Hesiod ever sang.

In the realm of etymology, as everybody now knows, before Bopp and Grimm, and other great scholars, laid the sure foundation of comparative philology on the principles of a philosophy, as all true philosophy is, at once inductive and deductive, the license of conjecture played a mad part—a part, it is only too evident, not yet fully played out—and specially raised such a glamour of illusion about topographical etymology, that the theme became disgusting to all sober-minded thinkers, or ludicrous, as the humour might be. We must, therefore, approach this subject with a more than common degree of caution, anxious rather to be instructed in what is solid, than to be amazed with what is ingenious. It shall be our endeavour to proceed step by step in this matter—patiently, as with the knowledge that our foot is on the brink of boggy ground, starting from obvious principles given by the constitution of the human mind, and confirmed by a large induction of unquestioned facts.

The most natural and obvious reason for naming a place so-and-so would be to express the nature of the situation by its most striking features, with the double view of impressing its character on the memory, and conveying to persons who had not seen it an idea of its peculiarity; i.e. the most obvious and natural topographical names are such as contain condensed descriptions or rude verbal pictures of the object. Thus the notion of the highest mountain in a district may be broadly conveyed by simply calling it the big mount, or, according to the order of words current in the Celtic languages, mount big; which is exactly what we find in Benmore, from mor, big, the name of several of the highest mountains in the Highlands of Scotland, specially of one in the south of Perthshire, near Killin, of another in Mull, the highest trap mountain in Scotland, and a third in Assynt. Again, to mark the very prominent feature of mountains elevated considerably above the normal height, that they are covered with snow all the year round, we find Lebanon, in the north of Palestine, named from the Hebrew leban, white; Mont Blanc, in Switzerland, in the same way from an old Teutonic word signifying the same thing, which found its way into Italian and the other Romanesque languages, fairly ousting the Latin albus; Olympus, from the Greek λάμπομαι, to shine; the Schneekoppe, in Silesia, from schnee, snow, and koppe, what we call kip in the Lowland topography of Scotland, i.e. a pointed hill, the same radically as the Latin caput, the head. In the same fashion one of the modern names of the ancient Mount Hermon is Jebel-eth-Thelj, the snowy mountain, just as the Himalayas receive their names from the Sanscrit haima = Greek χεîμα, winter.

The most obvious characteristic of any place, whether mountain or plain or valley, would be its shape and size, its relative situation high or low, behind or in the front, its colour, the kind of rock or soil of which it is composed, the climate which it enjoys, the vegetation in which it abounds, and the animals by which it is frequented. Let us take a few familiar examples of each of these cases; and, if we deal more largely in illustrations from the Scottish Highlands than from other parts of the world, it is for three sufficient reasons—because these regions are annually visited by the greatest number of tourists; because, from the general neglect of the Celtic languages, they stand most in need of interpretation; and because they are most familiar—not from book-knowledge only, but by actual inspection—to the present writer. In the matter of size, the tourist will find at Glenelg (from sealg, to hunt), in Inverness-shire, opposite Skye, where there are two well-preserved circular forts, the twin designations of Glenmore and Glenbeg; that is, Glenbig and Glenlittle—a contrast constantly occurring in the Highlands; the word beag, pronounced vulgarly in Argyleshire peek, signifying little, evidently the same as μικ in the Greek μικρός. As to relative situation, the root ard, in Latin arduus, frequently occurs; not, however, to express any very high mountain, but either a bluff fronting the sea, as in Ardnamorchuan (the rise of the great ocean, cuan, perhaps from ὼκεανός), or more frequently a slight elevation on the shore of a lake, what they call in England a rise, as in Ardlui, near the head of Loch Lomond, Ardvoirlich, and many others. The word lui, Gaelic laogh—the gh being silent, as in the English sigh—signifies a calf or a fawn, and gives name to the lofty mountain which the tourist sees on his right hand as he winds up where the railway is now being constructed from Dalmally to Tyndrum. Another frequent root to mark relative situation is CUL, behind, Latin culus, French cul, a word which gives name to a whole parish in Aberdeenshire, to the famous historical site of Culross, the reputed birthplace of St. Kentigern, and many others. This word means simply behind the headland, as does also Culchenzie (from ceann, the head), at the entrance to Loch Leven and Glencoe, which the tourist looks on with interest, as for two years the summer residence of the noble-minded Celtic evangelist Dr. Norman Macleod. But the most common root, marking relative situation, which the wanderer through Celtic countries encounters is inver, meaning below, or the bottom of a stream, of which aber is only a syncopated form, a variation which, small as it appears, has given rise to large controversy and no small shedding of ink among bellicose antiquarians. For it required only a superficial glance to observe that while Abers are scattered freely over Wales, they appear scantly in Scotland, and there with special prevalence only in the east and south-east of the Grampians—as in Aberdeen, Aberdour, Aberlemno in Fife, and others. On this the eager genius of archæological discovery, ever ready to poise a pyramid on its apex, forthwith raised the theory, that the district of Scotland where the Abers prevailed had been originally peopled by Celts of the Cymric or Welsh type, while the region of Invers marked out the ancient seats of the pure Caledonian Celts. But this theory, which gave great offence to some fervid Highlanders, so far as it stood on this argument, fell to the ground the moment that some more cool observer put his finger on half a dozen or a whole dozen of Invers, in perfect agreement hobnobbing with the Abers, not far south of Aberdeen; while, on the other hand, a zealous Highland colonel, now departed to a more peaceful sphere, pointed out several Abers straggling far west and north-west into the region of the Caledonian Canal and beyond it. But these slippery points are wisely avoided; and there can be no doubt, on the general principle, that relative situation has everywhere played a prominent part in the terminology of districts. Northumberland and Sutherland, and Cape Deas or Cape South, in Cantire, are familiar illustrations of this principle of nomenclature. In such cases the name, of course, always indicates by what parties it was imposed; Sutherland, or Southern-land, having received this appellation from the Orkney men, who lived to the north of the Pentland Firth.

The next element that claims mention is Colour. In this domain the most striking contrasts are black and white. In ancient Greece, a common name for rivers was Melas, or Black-water; one of which, that which flows into the Malaic Gulf, has translated itself into modern Greek as Mauro-nero, μαûρο in the popular dialect having supplanted the classical μἐλας; and νἐρο, as old, no doubt, as Nereus and the Nereids, having come into its pre-Homeric rights and driven out the usurping ὕδωρ. In the Scottish Highlands, dubh, black or dark, plays, as might be expected, a great figure in topographical nomenclature; of this let Benmuic Dubh, or the mount of the black sow, familiar to many a Braemar deer-stalker, serve as an example; while Cairngorm, the cradle of many a golden-gleaming gem, stands with its dark blue (gorm) cap immediately opposite, and recalls to the classical fancy its etymological congeners in the Cyanean rocks, so famous in early Greek fable. Of the contrasted epithet white, Leucadia (λευκός), where the poetess Sappho is famed to have made her erotic leap, is a familiar example. In the Highlands, ban (fair), or geal (white), is much less familiar in topographical nomenclature than dubh; Buidhe, on the other hand (yellow), corresponding to the ξανθός of the Greeks, is extremely common, as in Lochbuie at the south-east corner of Mull, one of the few remaining scattered links of the possessions of the Macleans, once so mighty and latterly so foolish, in those parts. Among other colours, glas (gray) is very common; so is dearg (red), from the colour of the rock, as in one of those splendid peaks that shoot up behind the slate quarries at the west end of Glencoe. Breac, also (spotted or brindled), is by no means uncommon, as in Ben Vrackie, prominent behind Pitlochrie, in Perthshire, in which word the initial b has been softened into a v by the law of aspiration peculiar to the Celtic languages.

There remain the two points of climate and vegetation, of which a few examples will suffice. In Sicily, the town of Selinus, whose magnificence remains preserved in indelible traces upon the soil, took its name from the wild parsley, σἐλινον, which grew plentifully on the ground, and which appears on the coins of the city. In the Scottish Highlands, no local name is more common than that which is familiarly known as the designation of one of the most genuine of the old Celtic chiefs, the head of the clan Macpherson—we mean the word Cluny (Gaelic cluain; possibly only a variety of grün, green), which signifies simply a green meadow, a vision often very delightful to a pedestrian after a long day’s tramp across brown brae and gray fell in those parts. The abundance of oak in ancient Celtic regions, where it is not so common now, is indicated by the frequency of the termination darach (from which Derry, in Ireland, is corrupted; Greek δρûς and δόρυ, as in the designation of one of the Campbells in Argyle, Auchin-darroch, i.e. oak-field. The pine, giubhas, appears in Kingussie, pine-end, in the midst of that breezy open space which spreads out to the north-west of the Braemar Grampians. In Beith and Aultbea (birch-brook) we have beath, Latin betula, a birch-tree; elm and ash are rare; heather, fraoch, especially in the designation of islands, as Eileanfraoch, in Loch Awe, and another in the Sound of Kerrera, close by Oban. Of climate we find traces in Auchnasheen (sian), on the open blasty road between Dingwall and Janetown, signifying the field of wind and rain; in Mealfourvonie, the broad hill of the frosty moor, composed of the three roots maol (broad and bald), fuar (cold), and mhonaid (upland); in Balfour (cold town), and in the remarkable mountain in Assynt called Canisp, which appears to be a corruption of Ceann-uisge, or Rainy-head.

Lastly, of animals: madadh, a fox, appears in Lochmaddy and Ardmaddy; coin, of a dog, in Achnachoin, or Dog’s-field, one of the three bloody spots that mark the butchery of the false Campbell in Glencoe; and, throwing our glance back two thousand years, in Cynoscephalæ, or the Dog’s-head, in Thessaly, where the sturdy Macedonian power at last bowed in submission before the proud swoop of the Roman eagles; the familiar cow (baa, Lat. bos) gives its name to that fair loch, which sleeps so quietly in the bosom of beautiful Mull; while the goat, famous also in the sad history of Athenian decline at Aigospotami, or the Goat’s-river, gives its name to the steepy heights of Ardgour (from gobhar, Lat. caper), a fragment of the old inheritance of the Macleans, which rise up before the traveller so majestically as he steams northward from Ballachulish to Fort William and Banavie.

In a country composed almost entirely of mountain ridges, with intervening hollows of various kinds, it is only natural that the variety in the scenery, produced by the various slopes and aspects of the elevated ground, should give rise to a descriptive nomenclature of corresponding variety. This is especially remarkable in Gaelic; and the tourist in the Scottish Highlands will not travel far without meeting, in addition to the Ben and Ard already mentioned, the following specific designations:—

In the Lowlands, pen, law, fell, bræ, hope, rise, edge, indicate similar varieties. Among these pen, as distinguished from the northern ben, evidently points to a Welsh original. Hope is a curious word, which a south-country gentleman once defined to me as “the point of the low land mounting the hill whence the top can be seen.” Of course, if this be true, it means an elevation not very far removed from the level ground, because, as every hill-climber knows, the top of a huge eminence ceases to be visible the moment you get beyond what the Greeks call the “fore-feet” of the mountain.

In the designation of the intervening hollows, or low land, the variety of expression is naturally less striking. Glen serves for almost all varieties of a narrow Highland valley. A very narrow rent or fissured gorge is called a glachd. The English word dale, in Gaelic dail, means in that language simply a field, or flat stretch of land at the bottom of the hills. It is to be noted, however, that this word is both Celtic and Teutonic; but, in topographical etymology, with a difference distinctly indicative of a twofold origin. In an inland locality where the Scandinavians never penetrated, Dal is always prefixed to the other element of the designation, as in Dalwhinnie, Dalnacardoch, and Dalnaspidal, the field of meeting, the field of the smithy, and the field of the hospital, all in succession within a short distance on the road between the Spey uplands and Blair Athol. On the other hand, a postfixed dale, as in Borrowdale, Easdale, and not a few others, indicates a Saxon or Norse origin. The word den or dean, as in the Dean Bridge, Edinburgh, and the Den Burn, Aberdeen, is Anglo-Saxon denn, and appears in the English Tenterden, and some others. Another Celtic name for field is ach, the Latin ag-er, which appears in a number of Highland places, as in Ach-na-cloiche (stone field), in Argyleshire. A hollow surrounded by mountains is called by the well-known name of LAGGAN, which is properly a diminutive from lag, in Greek λάκκος, in Latin lacus, a hollow filled with water, and in German a mere loch, or hole, into which a mouse might creep. A special kind of hollow, lying between the outstretched arms of a big Ben, and opening at one end into the vale below, is called in Gaelic coire, literally a cauldron—a word which the genius of Walter Scott has made a permanent possession of the English language. In England such mountain hollows are often denominated combs, as in Addiscombe, Ashcomb, a venerable old British word of uncorrupted Cornish descent, and which, so far as I know, does not appear in Scottish topography, unless it be in Cummertrees (on the shore, traigh), near Annan, and Cumbernauld; but this I am not able to verify by local knowledge. The word cumar appears in O’Reilly’s Irish dictionary as “the bed of a large river or a narrow sea, a hollow generally,” but seems quite obsolete in the spoken Gaelic of to-day. The termination holm is well-known both in English and Scotch names, and proclaims itself as characteristically Scandinavian, in the beautiful metropolis of the Swedes. In Gaelic districts a holm, that is, a low watery meadow, is generally called a lon, a word which has retained its place in Scotch as loan—Loaning, Loanhead, Loanend, and is fundamentally identical with the English lane and lawn. The varieties of sea-coast are expressed by the words traigh, cladach, camus, corran, wick, loch, rutha, ross, caolas, stron, salen, among which, in passing, we may specially note camus, from the root cam, Greek κάμπτω, to bend: hence Morecambe Bay, near Lancaster, signifies the great bend; corran, a scythe, evidently allied to the Latin curvus, and used in the Highlands to denote any crescent-shaped shore, as at Corranferry, Ardgour, in Lochfinne; wick, a familiar Scandinavian word signifying a bay, and which, with the Gaelic article prefixed, seems to have blundered itself into NIGG at Aberdeen, and near Fearn in Ross-shire; caolas, a strait, combining etymologically the very distant and very different localities of Calais and Ballachulish; stron or sron, a nose, which lends its name to a parish near the end of Loch Sunart, in Morvern, and thence to a famous mineral found in its vicinity; lastly, salen is nothing but salt, and appears in the south of Ireland and the north-west of Scotland, under the slightly varied forms of Kinsale and Kintail, both of which words signify the head of the salt water; for Irish and Gaelic are only one language with a slightly different spelling here and there, and a sprinkling of peculiar words now and then.

The only other features of natural scenery that play a noticeable part in topographical etymology are the rivers, lakes, wells, and waterfalls; and they need not detain us long. The Gaelic uisge, water, of which the Latin aqua is an abraded form, appears in the names of Scottish rivers as Esk, and of Welsh rivers as Usc. The familiar English Avon is the Gaelic amhainn, evidently softened down by aspiration from the Latin amnis. This avon often appears at the end of river names curtailed, as in Garonne, the rough river, from the Gaelic root garbh, rough. The Don, so common as a river name from the Black Sea to Aberdeen, means either the deep river or the brown river. A small river, brook in English, gives name to not a few places and persons. In the Scottish Highlands, and in those parts of the Lowlands originally inhabited by the Celtic race, the word alt performs the same functions. Loch, in Gaelic, answering to the English mere (Latin mare), appears most commonly in the Highlands, as Kinloch, i.e. the town or house at the head of the lake; and tobar, a well, frequently, as in Holywell, connected with a certain religious sanctity, appears in Tobermory, i.e. the well of the Virgin Mary, one of the most beautiful quiet bits of bay scenery in Great Britain. Of places named from waterfalls (eas, from esk), a significant element in Highland scenery, Inverness, and Moness near Aberfeldy, are the most notable, the one signifying “the town at the bottom of the river, which flows from the lake where there is the great waterfall,” i.e. Foyers; and the other, “the waterfall of the moorish uplands,” which every one understands who walks up to it.

So much for the features of unappropriated nature, stereotyped, as it were, at once and for ever, in the old names of local scenery. But as into a landscape an artist will inoculate his sentiment and symbolise his fancy, so on the face of the earth men are fond to stamp the trace of their habitation and their history. Under this influence the nomenclature of topography becomes at once changed from a picture of natural scenery to a record of human fortunes. And in this department it is plain that the less varied and striking the features of nature, the greater the necessity of marking places by the artificial differentiation produced by the presence of human dwellings. Hence, in the flat, monotonous plains of North Germany, the abundance of places ending in hausen and heim, which are only the Saxon forms of our English house and home. Of the termination hausen, Sachsenhausen, the home of the Saxons, and Frankenhausen, the home of the Franks, are amongst the most notable examples. Heim is pleasantly associated with refreshing draughts in Hochheim, i.e. high home, on the north bank of the Rhine a little below Mainz, whence a sharp, clear wine being imported, with the loss of the second syllable, and the transformation of ch into k, produced the familiar hock. This heim in a thousand places of England becomes ham, but in Scotland, where the Celtic element prevails, appears only rarely in the south-east and near the English border, as in Coldingham and Ednam—the birthplace of the poet Thomson—contracted from Edenham. Another root very widely expressive of human habitation, under the varying forms of beth, bo, and by, is scattered freely from the banks of Jordan to the islands of the Hebrides in the north-west of Scotland. First under this head we have the great army of Hebrew beths, not a few of which are familiar to our ear from the cherished teachings of early childhood, as—Bethabara, the house of the ferry; Bethany, the house of dates; Bethaven, the house of naughtiness; Bethcar, the house of lambs; Bethdagon, the house of the fish-god Dagon; Bethel, the house of God; Bethshemesh, the house of the sun (like the Greek Heliopolis); and a score of others. Bo is the strictly Danish form of the root, at least in the dictionary, where the verb boe, to dwell, also appears. Examples of this are found in Skibo, in Ross-shire, and Buness, at the extreme end of Unst, the seat of the Edmonstones, a family well known in the annals of Shetland literature; but more generally, in practice, it takes the softened form of by, as in hundreds of local designations in England, specially in Lincolnshire, where the Danes were for a long time at home. Near the English border, as in Lockerby, this same termination appears; otherwise in Scotland it is rare. In the Sclavonic towns of Mecklenburg and Prussia, it takes the form of bus, as in Pybus, while in Cornish it is bos, which is a later form of bod (German bude, English booth, Scotch bothy), which stands out prominently in Bodmin and other towns, not only in Cornwall, but in Wales. The termination bus appears likewise in not a few local designations in the island of Islay, where the Danes had many settlements. In Skye it appears as bost, as in Skeabost, one of the oldest seats of the Macdonalds. The other Saxon or Scandinavian terms frequently met with throughout England and in the north-east of Scotland are—ton, setter or ster, stead, stow, stoke, hay, park, worth, bury, thorp, toft, thwaite. In Germany, besides heim and hausen, as already mentioned, we have the English hay, under the form hagen, a fence; and thorp under the form dorf, a village; and worth under the forms worth and werth, which are merely variations of the Greek χόρτος, English yard, and the Sclavonic gard and gorod, and the Celtic garad, the familiar word in the Highlands for a stone wall or dyke. In Germany, also, weiler, from weilen, to dwell, and leben, to live, are thickly sprinkled; hof, also, is extremely common, signifying a court or yard—a suffix which the French, in that part of Germany which they stole from the Empire, turned into court or ville, as in Thionville from Diedenhofen.

So much for the Teutonic part of this branch of topographical designation. In the Highlands tigh and bail are the commonest words to denote a human dwelling, the one manifestly an aspirated form of the Latin tignum (Greek στἐγος, German dach), and the other as plainly identical with the πόλις which appears in Sebastopol, and not a few cities, both ancient and modern, where Greek influence or Greek affectation prevailed. With regard to bal, it is noticeable that in Ireland it generally takes the form of bally, which is the full form of the word in Gaelic also, baile, there being no final mute vowels in that language; but in composition for topographical use final e is dropped, as in Balmoral, the majestic town or house, from morail, magnificent, a very apt designation for a royal residence, by whatever prophetic charm it came to be so named before her present Majesty learned the healthy habit of breathing pure Highland air amid the fragrant birches and clear waters of Deeside. Tigh, though less common than bal, is not at all unfrequent in the mountains; and tourists in the West Highlands are sure to encounter two of the most notable between Loch Lomond and Oban. The first, Tyndrum, the house on the ridge, at the point where the ascent ceases as you cross from Killin to Dalmally; and the other Taynuilt, or the house of the brook, in Scotch burnhouse, beyond Ben Cruachan, where the road begins to wend through the rich old copsewood towards Oban. I remember also a curious instance of the word tigh in a local designation, half-way between Inveraray and Loch Awe. In that district a little farmhouse on the right of the road is called Tighnafead, i.e. whistle-house (fead, a whistle, Latin fides), which set my philological fancy immediately on the imagination that this exposed place was so called from some peculiar whistling of the blast down from the hills immediately behind; but such imaginations are very unsafe; for the fact turned out to be, if somewhat less poetical, certainly much more comfortable, that this house of call, in times within memory, stood at a greater distance from the road than it now does, which caused the traveller, when he came down the descent on a cold night, sharp-set for a glass of strong whisky, to make his presence and his wish known by a shrill whistle across the hollow.

So much for tigh. The only other remark that I would make here is, that the word clachan, so well known from Scott’s Clachan of Aberfoyle, does not properly mean a village, as Lowlanders are apt to imagine, but only a churchyard, or, by metonymy, a church—as the common phrase used by the natives, Di domhnaich dol do’n chlachan, “going to church on Sunday,” sufficiently proves—the word properly meaning only the stones in the churchyard, which mark the resting-place of the dead; and if the word is ever used for a village, it is only by transference to signify the village in which the parish church is, and the parish churchyard.

But it is not only the dwellings of men, but their actions, that make places interesting; and as the march of events in great historical movements generally follows the march of armies, it follows that camps and battle-fields and military settlements will naturally have left strong traces in the topography of every country where human beings dwell. And accordingly we find that the chester and the caster, added as a generic term to so many English towns, are simply the sites of ancient Roman castra or camps; while Cologne, on the Rhine, marks one of the most prosperous of their settlements in Germany. Curiously analogous to this is the Cöln, a well-known quarter of Berlin, on the Spree, where the German emperors first planted a Teutonic colony in the midst of a Sclavonic population. In the solemn march of Ossianic poetry, the word blar generally signifies a field of battle; but, as this word properly signifies only a large field or open space, we have no right to say that such names as Blair Athol and Blairgowrie have anything to do with the memory of sanguinary collisions. Alexandria, in Egypt, is one of the few remaining places of note that took their name from the brilliant Macedonian Helleniser of the East. Alexandria, in the vale of Leven, in Dumbartonshire, tells of the family of Smollett, well known in the annals of Scottish literary genius, and still, by their residence, adding a grace to one of the most beautiful districts of lake scenery in the world. Adrianople stereotypes the memory of one of the most notable of the Roman emperors, who deemed it his privilege and pleasure to visit the extremest limits of his vast dominions, and leave some beneficial traces of his kingship there. The name Petersburg, whose Teutonic character it is impossible to ignore, indicates the civilisation of a Sclavonic country by an emperor whose early training was received from a people of German blood and breed; while Constantinople recalls the momentous change which took place in the centre of gravity of the European world, when the declining empire of the Roman Cæsars was about to become Greek in its principal site, as it had long been in its dominant culture. The streets of great cities, as one may see prominently in Paris, in their designations often contain a register of the most striking events of their national history. Genuine names of streets in old cities are a historical growth and an anecdotal record, which only require the pen of a cunning writer to make them as attractive as a good novel. London, in this view, is particularly interesting; and Emerson, I recollect, in his book, How the Great City grew (London, 1862), tells an amusing story about the great fire in London, which certain pious persons observed to have commenced at a street called Pudding Lane, and ended at a place called Pye Corner, in memory of which they caused the figure of a fat boy to be put up at Smithfield, with the inscription on his stomach, “This boy is in memory put up for the late fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666.” Many a dark and odorous close in Old Edinburgh also, to men who, like the late Robert Chambers, could read stones with knowing eyes, is eloquent with those tales of Celtic adventure and Saxon determination which make the history of Scotland so full of dramatic interest; while, on the other hand, the flunkeyism of the persons who, to tickle the lowest type of aristocratic snobbery, baptized certain streets of New Edinburgh with Buckingham Terrace, Belgrave Crescent, Grosvenor Street, and such like apish mimicry of metropolitan West Endism, stinks in the nostrils and requires no comment. But not only to grimy streets of reeking towns, but to the broad track of the march of the great lines of the earth’s surface, there is attached a nomenclature which tells the history of the adventurous captain, or the courageous commander, who first redeemed these regions from the dim limbo of the unknown, and brought them into the distinct arena of cognisable and manageable facts. In the frosty bounds of the far North-West, the names of Mackenzie, Maclintock, and Maclure proclaim the heroic daring that belongs so characteristically to the Celtic blood in Scotland. But it is in the moral triumphs of religion, which works by faith in what is noble, love of what is good, and reverence for what is great, that the influence of history over topographical nomenclature is most largely traced. In ancient Greece, the genial piety which worshipped its fairest Avatar in the favourite sun-god Apollo, stamped its devotion on the name of Apollonia, on the Ionian Sea, and other towns whose name was legion. In Cornwall, almost every parish is named after some saintly apostle, who, in days of savage wildness and wastefulness, had brought light and peace and humanity into these remote regions. In the Highlands of Scotland, the Kilbrides (kill from cella, a shrine), Kilmartins, Kilmarnocks, and Kilmallies everywhere attest the grateful piety of the forefathers of the Celtic race in days which, if more dark, were certainly not more cold than the times in which we now live. In the Orkneys the civilising influence of the clergy, or, in some cases, no doubt, their love for pious seclusion, is frequently marked by the Papas or priests’ islands. In Germany, Munich or Monacum, which shows a monk in its coat-of-arms, has retained to the present day the zeal for sacerdotal sanctitude from which it took its name; and the same must be said of Muenster, in Westphalia (from μοναστῆρι, in modern Greek a cathedral, English minster), the metropolis of Ultramontane polity and priestly pretension in Northern Germany.

But it is not only in commemorating, like coins, special historical events, that local names act as an important adjunct to written records; they give likewise the clue to great ethnological facts and movements of which written history preserves no trace. In this respect topographical etymology presents a striking analogy to geology; for, as the science of the constitution of the earth’s crust reveals a fossilised history of life in significant succession, long antecedent to the earliest action of the human mind on the objects of terrestrial nature, so the science of language to the practised eye discloses a succession of races in regions where no other sign of their existence remains. If it were doubted, for instance, whether at any period the Lowlands of Scotland had been possessed by a Celtic race, and asserted roundly that from the earliest times the plains had been inhabited by a people of Teutonic blood, and only the mountain district to the west and north-west was the stronghold of the Celt, the obvious names of not a few localities in the east and south-east of Scotland would present an impassable bar to the acceptance of any such dogma. One striking instance of this occurs in Haddingtonshire, where a parish is now called Garavalt—by the very same appellation as a well-known waterfall near Braemar, in the hunting forest of the late Prince Consort; and with the same propriety in both cases, for the word in Gaelic signifies a rough brook, and such a brook is the most striking characteristic of both districts. Cases of this kind clearly indicate the vanishing of an original Celtic people from districts now essentially Teutonic both in speech and character. The presence of a great Sclavonic people in Northern Germany, and of an extensive Sclavonic immigration into Greece in mediæval times, is attested with the amplest certitude in the same way. A regular fringe of Scandinavian names along the north and north-west coast of Scotland would, to the present hour, attest most indubitably the fact of a Norse dominion in those quarters operating for centuries, even had Haco and the battle of Largs been swept altogether from the record of history and from the living tradition of the people. To every man who has been in Norway, Laxfiord, in West Ross-shire, a stream well known to salmon-fishers, carries this Scandinavian story on its face; and no man who has walked the streets of Copenhagen will have any difficulty, when he sails into the beautiful bay of Portree, in knowing the meaning of the great cliff called the Storr, which he sees along the coast a little towards the north; for this means simply the great cliff, storr being the familiar Danish for great, as mor is the Gaelic. Ethnological maps may in this way be constructed exactly in the same fashion as geological; and the sketch of one such for Great Britain the reader will find in Mr. Taylor’s well-known work on Names and Places.

With regard to the law of succession in these ethnological strata, as indicated by topographical nomenclature, the following three propositions may be safely laid down:—1. The names of great objects of natural scenery, particularly of mountains and rivers, will generally be significant in the language of the people who were the original inhabitants of the country. 2. Names of places in the most open and accessible districts of a country will be older than similar names in parts which are more difficult of access; but—3, these very places being most exposed to foreign invasion, are apt to invite an adventurous enemy, whose settlement in the conquered country is generally accompanied with a partial, sometimes with a very considerable, change of local nomenclature.

In reference to this change of population, Mr. Taylor in one place uses the significant phrase, “The hills contain the ethnological sweepings of the plains.” Very true; but the effect of this on the ethnological character of the population of the places is various, and in the application requires much caution. It is right, for instance, to say generally that the Celtic language has everywhere in Europe retreated from the plains into the mountainous districts; but the people often still remain where the language has retreated, as the examination of any directory in many a district of Scotland, where only English is now spoken, will largely show. In Greece, in the same way, many districts present only Greek and Sclavonic names of places, where the population, within recent memory, is certainly Albanian. Inquiries of this nature always require no less caution than learning; otherwise, as Mr. Skene observes, what might have been, properly conducted, an all-important element in fixing the ethnology of any country, becomes, in rash hands and with hot heads, a delusion and a snare.[1]

But the science of language, when wisely conducted, not only presents an interesting analogy to geological stratification; it sometimes goes further, and bears direct witness to important geological changes as conclusive as any evidence derived from the existing conformation of the earth’s crust. How this comes to pass may easily be shown by a few familiar examples. The words wold and weald originally meant wood and forest, as the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the living use of the German language—wald—alike declare; but the wolds at present known in Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, and other parts of England, are generally bare and treeless, and in bad weather very cheerless places indeed. If, then, “there is nothing arbitrary in language,” and all local names tell an historical tale, it is certain that, at the time when those names were imposed, these same sites were part of an immense forest. The geologist, when, in the far-stretching bogs east of Glencoe, and near Kinloch Ewe, and in many other places of Scotland, he calls attention to the fact of layers of gigantic trees lying now deeply embedded under the peat, adduces an argument with regard to the primitive vegetation of our part of the world not a whit more convincing. The same fact of a lost vegetation is revealed in not a few places of England which end in the old word hurst, signifying a forest. Again, there is a large family of places in and about the Harz Mountains, in Germany, ending in ode, as Osterode, Hasselrode, Werningerode, and so forth. Now most of these places, as specially Hasselrode, are now remarkably free from those leagues of leafy luxuriance that give such a marked character to the scenery of that mountain district. It is certain, however, that they were at one time in the centre of an immense forest; for the word rode, radically the same as our rid, and perhaps the Welsh rhydd, Gaelic reidh, simply means “to make clear” or “clean,” and teaches that the forest in that part had been cleared for human habitation.

Once more: it is a well-known fact in geology that the border limit between sea and land is constantly changing, the briny element in some cliffy places, as to the north of Hull, systematically undermining the land, and stealing away the farmer’s acreage inch by inch and foot by foot; while in other places, from the conjoint action of river deposits and tidal currents, large tracts of what was once a sea-bottom are added to the land. The geological proof of this is open often to the most superficial observer; but the philological proof, when you once hold the key of it, is no less patent. In the Danish language—which is a sort of half-way house between high German and English—the word oe signifies an island. This oe, in the shape of ay, ea, ey, or y, appears everywhere on the British coast, particularly in the West Highlands, as in Colonsay, Torosay, Oransay, and in Orkney; and if there be any locality near the sea wearing this termination, not now surrounded by water, the conclusion is quite certain, on philological grounds, that it once was so. Here the London man will at once think on Bermondsey and Chelsea, and he will think rightly; but he must not be hasty to draw Stepney under the conditions of the same category, for the EY in that word, if I am rightly informed, is a corruption from hithe, a well-known Anglo-Saxon and good old English term signifying a haven; and generally, in all questions of topographical etymology, there is a risk of error where the old spelling of the word is not confronted with the form which, by the attritions and abrasions of time, it may have assumed.

These observations, which at the request of the author of the following pages I have hastily set down, will be sufficient to indicate the spirit in which the study of topographical etymology ought to be pursued. Of course, I have no share in the praise which belongs to the successful execution of so laborious an investigation; neither, on the other hand, can blame be attached to me for such occasional slips as the most careful writer may make in a matter where to err is easy, and where conjecture has so long been in the habit of usurping the place of science. But I can bear the most honest witness to the large research, sound judgment, and conscientious accuracy of the author; and feel happy to have my name, in a subsidiary way, connected with a work which, I am convinced, will prove an important addition to the furniture of our popular schools.

College, Edinburgh,

February 1875.