Section III.
The Lowlands.—Population.—Language.—Norwegian-Danish
Names of Places.
The boundaries between Scotland and England were anciently very unsettled. After the time of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings speedily extended their dominion over the Cheviot Hills, and frequently to the Firths of Clyde and Forth; whilst considerable tracts of the north of England, particularly in the north-western districts, were sometimes united with the Scotch Lowlands, or with kingdoms which existed there. Until England and Scotland were at length united under one crown, the north of England was almost uninterruptedly the theatre of the bitterest border warfare. The blood of many thousands of bold warriors has been spilt on that land which now teems with the blessings of wealth and peace.
Part of this old border land, or the most southern part of the present Scotland, from the Cheviot Hills to the narrow neck of land between the Firths of Clyde and Forth,—a tract of about sixty English miles—has not a much more mountainous character than the north of England. The hills undulate in the same gentle forms; and it is only here and there that a single rugged mountain shows its heath-covered or bare and peaked top. Large and well-cultivated plains alternate with charming valleys, which are frequently narrow, and so fertile that in some places creeping plants, bushes, and trees, almost entirely conceal the rivulets that wind through them.
The Highlands extend themselves from the Firth of Clyde to the north-west and north; whilst the Lowlands take a direction from the Firth of Forth along the eastern border of the Highlands, and by the coasts of the North Sea. To the Firth of Tay, and northwards to the Grampian Hills, the Lowlands are not very broad or extensive, whilst the Highland mountains nearly approach the seashore. It is not till we have crossed the Grampian Hills that those large level plains open upon us which comprehend the north-easternmost part of Scotland, particularly the present Aberdeenshire. From these less-wooded plains we turn towards the north-west into the fertile and well-wooded Moray; whence a transition again takes place to the Highlands, which begin in the adjoining shire of Inverness. At this extreme point the Lowlands have, as it were, exhausted all their splendour and abundance. Down towards the coast the land is filled with gently-sloping hills, and intersected by rivers, whose rapid currents remind one of the neighbourhood of the mountains. At a distance from the coast the land rises, the tops of the mountains become barer and sharper, the valleys have a greater depth, and the roaring of the streams over fragments of rock is heard more distinctly. The mountains, as they rise from the Lowlands to the Highlands, afford in a still higher degree than the more southern border mountains, the most enchanting prospects over the coasts and sea. It is with difficulty that the spectator tears himself from the view of the charms of the Lowlands, to bury himself in the dark mountains that rise so solemn and menacing before him.
Throughout the Lowlands, the people, both in personal appearance and character, very much resemble the inhabitants of the north of England. This is particularly the case with the inhabitants of the southern borders, between the Cheviot Hills and the Firths of Clyde and Forth. The same light-coloured hair and the same frame of body, which, in the north of England, remind us of the people’s descent from the Scandinavians, indicate here also considerable immigrations of that people into the southern part of Scotland, and thence farther up along the east coast. According to a very common saying here, even the language of the Lowlands is so much like that of Scandinavia, that Lowland seamen wrecked on the coasts of Jutland and Norway have been able to converse without difficulty in their mother tongue with the common people there. This is undoubtedly a great exaggeration; but this much is certain, that the popular language in the Lowlands contains a still greater number of Scandinavian words and phrases than even the dialect of the north of England. We must not unhesitatingly believe that the Saxon language did not extend itself from the north of England to the Scotch Lowlands till after it had been mixed with Danish; although the remote situation of the latter, so high towards the north, was certainly far more adapted to preserve the old Danish forms of words than that of north England, which was more exposed to the operation of newer fashions. But the Danish or Scandinavian elements in the popular language of the Lowlands are too considerable to admit of such a supposition, not to speak of the Scandinavian appearance of the inhabitants. These necessarily indicate Scandinavian immigrations; and, to judge from the present popular language, we might be easily tempted to believe that a far greater number of Northmen had settled in the Scottish Lowlands than in the middle and northern districts of England. We might, consequently, also expect to meet with a proportionately greater number of Scandinavian names of places in the Lowlands than in England.
But this is very far from being the case. Extremely few places with Scandinavian names are to be found in the Scotch Lowlands; and even those few are confined, almost without exception, to the old border land between the Cheviot Hills and the Firths of Clyde and Forth, and to the counties nearest the English border. Dumfriesshire, lying directly north of Cumberland and the Solway Firth, forms the central point of such places. Northumberland and Durham, the two north-easternmost counties of England, contain but a scanty number of them; and consequently must have possessed, in early times at least, no very numerous Scandinavian population. Cumberland, on the contrary, was early remarkable for such a population; whence it will appear natural enough that the first Scandinavian colonists in the Scotch border lands preferred to settle in the neighbourhood of that county. On the south-easternmost coast of Scotland, they would not only have been separated from their countrymen in the north of England by two intervening counties, but also divided by a broad sea from their kinsmen in Denmark and Norway. Such a situation would have been much more exposed and dangerous for them than the opposite coast, where they had in their neighbourhood the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland, inhabited by the Northmen, as well as the Scandinavian colonies in Ireland and the Isle of Man.
The Scandinavian population in Dumfriesshire evidently appears to have emigrated from Cumberland over the Liddle and Esk into the plains which spread themselves westward of those rivers; at least the names of places there have the very same character as in Cumberland. Not only are the mountains called “fell” (Fjeld) and “rigg” (Ryg), as is also the case in the other border lands, but, what is more peculiar to Dumfriesshire, the terminations of “thwaite,” “beck,” and “garth,” not to mention “by,” or “bie,” are transplanted hither from Cumberland: as, Thornythwaite, Twathwaites, Robiethwaite, Murraythwaite, Helbeck, Greenbeck, Botchbeck, Torbeck, Stonybeck, Waterbeck, Hartsgarth, Tundergarth, Applegarth, Locherby, Alby, Middlebie, Dunnaby, Wysebie, Perceby, Denbie, Newby, Milby, Warmanbie, Sorbie, Canoby, and others.
These Scandinavian names of places are chiefly met with between the rivers Esk and Nith. Various authors have also endeavoured to show that the fishermen on the Nith have to the present day characteristic and original Scandinavian terms for their tackle and modes of fishing:—for instance, “pocknet,” Icelandic pokanet; “leister,” or “lister,” Icelandic ljóstr, Danish Lyster; “haaving,” Norwegian haave, i.e., to draw small nets in the water, &c., &c. Somewhat east of the river, and north of the town of Dumfries, lies the parish of “Tinwald,” a name undoubtedly identical with Thingvall, or Tingvold; which, as the appropriate Scandinavian term for places where the Thing was held, is found in other districts of the British Isles colonized by the Northmen. And it was, indeed, natural that the Scandinavian colonists in the south-east of Scotland should fix their chief Thing place in the district most peopled by them.
From Dumfriesshire the Scandinavian names of places branch off as it were in an arch towards the west and east. Some few appear at intervals towards the west, as in Kircudbright (Begbie, Cogarth), in Wigton (Sorby, Killiness), in Ayr (opposite little Cumbray, Crosby, Sterby, Bushby, and Magby), and also in Lanark (Bushby, close to the south-west of Glasgow). Towards the east, some few are met with in Roxburgh, as, for instance, on the borders of Cumberland, “Corby,” and “Stonegarthside,” and on the frontier of Northumberland several in haugh (Höi, a hill) and holm. But on the whole only a few in by are still to be found on the borders between Berwick and Haddington (such as Humbie, Blegbie, and Pockbie). Towards Glasgow and Edinburgh the mountains are no longer called “fell” and “rigg.” The Scandinavian names of places cease entirely in these districts; and only the Scandinavian word “fjörðr,” or Fjord, is heard here, as well as farther towards the north in the names of fiords (or firths) namely: Firth of Forth, Firth of Clyde, Firth of Tay, Moray Firth, and Dornoch Firth.
In the Lowlands, the number of Scandinavian names of places is quite insignificant when compared with the original Celtic, or even with the Anglo-Saxon names. Whence we may conclude that though a considerable immigration of Northmen into the Lowlands undoubtedly took place, it must have occurred under circumstances which prevented them from being sufficiently powerful to change the original names of places. We must, in particular, assume that the immigration took place much later than the Danish conquests in England; and on the whole we shall not be far from the truth in asserting, that as the Danish conquests in England must have driven many Anglo-Saxons into Scotland, so also the subsequent Norman conquest must have compelled many Danes and Norwegians, settled in the north of England, to cross the Scottish border.
According to this view, most of the Scandinavian settlements in the middle and northern parts of the Lowlands are to be referred at the earliest to the close of the eleventh century; and at so late a period an entire change of the ancient names of places then existing there, could not, of course, be effected.