|
|
|
|
Notes from a talk given to the Maybole Historical Society by Catherine Lucy Czerkawska |
|
|
Place names are like little gems, dotted about the landscape. They have complicated interiors, and sometimes turbulent and stressful histories. They are always descriptive and usually accurate but only if you can figure them out. They are like a host of little puzzles. They reflect the history of an area; and looked at in conjunction with one another they paint a picture as surely as any contemporary account. And you make arbitrary changes to them at your peril. While place names are essentially literary ie written down on maps and in deeds and accounts, they also have a very strong oral element. They are passed on, handed down, as are the stories that go with them and the pronunciations which also tell us something about their derivations. So finding out what they mean is like detective work. As part of a postgraduate course which I did in Leeds I wrote a dissertation on Fishing Traditions in South Ayrshire. Most of the material which I used for that piece of work was oral , ie I went and interviewed old fishermen, all of whom are long since gone, although I still have the tapes. I also explored old documents, and maps. While I was doing this became very interested in Ayrshire and Galloway place names, their immense variety, and the way they had changed over time. I already knew from my study of Middle English just how little reliance could be placed on spelling, before widespread literacy (and printing!) . That, coupled with an understanding of the importance of traditional pronunciations, gave me a new perspective on placenames, and one of my potential plans, after I finished in Leeds, was to return to Edinburgh University to research a thesis on place names in Galloway. It was one of those alternatives which I didn’t choose. However, while I was researching the local history of Maybole and its surroundings for various creative writing projects over a number of years, I found myself again becoming interested in the remote history, archaeology and prehistory of the area and continuing to explore its placenames and their derivations in some detail.
We know that the ancient inhabitants of these islands worked in stone and flint, made arrowheads, made axeheads including beautiful ceremonial jadeite axes which never saw practical use. We know from their funeral customs that they held profound religious beliefs and from the precision of their building that they had knowledge of mathematics. But we do not know what they called themselves because they left no written records. And nor do we know what the very first metal working settlers who came from Europe called the indigenous peoples of Britain, or even what they called themselves either. But we know that they worked in bronze and gold using sophisticated techniques at least some of which we have lost today. We know that the “grave archaeology” of Britain changed and so we can make assumptions about different beliefs and presumably ways of life which they brought with them. But again, we can’t be sure about very much and certainly not about what kind of language they spoke. “We have no knowledge of the languages spoken in Britain before the advent of the Celtic speaking peoples “ says Stuart Piggott . The bronze age gave way to the iron age, as Celtic speaking peoples arrived but they took many hundred of years to establish themselves as a dominant presence in Britain, and we suspect that they came gradually. The presence of iron using, Celtic speaking peoples in Scotland can only be inferred from the seventh century BC onwards– by their hill forts we know them, by their archaeological remains, and by the remains of their song and story, surviving embedded in later literary texts and in ongoing stories and legends.
The tribes who lived in Ayrshire were the Novantes, and in Galloway the Dumnoniae and as far as we can know anything we know that they both spoke something resembling Welsh and could understand each other. But “Welsh” is I’m afraid another red herring. We only call it that because that’s where it survived longest, in Wales.” P” Celtic is what linguists call the language of the Britons, that loose conglomeration of tribes that the Romans found living (and fighting) here when they arrived. They called the country Britannia because it was the land of the Pritani, which, they believed, was what these Celtic peoples called themselves – it meant, or they certainly took it to mean “painted people” a custom which they attributed to all the Brits and not just that part of them which we have come to know as Picts. It was a custom which the Romans despised as savage. There are (to put it simply) , two kinds of Celtic language. There is P Celtic, which was spoken throughout the island of Britain and from which Welsh is descended. And there is the older Q Celtic which was spoken in Ireland and from which modern Irish and Scots Gaelic are descended. But the situation is complicated by the fact that the people we now know as “Picts”, lived north of the Forth Clyde Line, with occasional warlike sorties south, and they also spoke – so it’s believed by scholars – another version of P Celtic, with elements of Q Celtic and also with elements of something else – another language altogether. And maybe the Picts also merit their separate identity because they tattooed themselves very beautifully, (There is a sense of “picture people” in the word Pict) and because their stone carving and metal working skills were different and wonderful enough for us to think that maybe they were a distinct and powerful grouping with different religious practices. In spite of claims to the contrary (mostly based on a faulty reading of old texts) the Picts were never native to Galloway though they certainly visited! There is not a scrap of evidence for Pictish place names in Galloway. There are however, the remains of three coastal brochs, said to have been built by marauding Picts as “piratical strongholds” and this may well have been the case. Maybe they came to some agreement with the native Brits who let them get on with it. The tribes who lived in this part of Strathclyde, ie Ayrshire and Galloway - spoke a version of British or P Celtic for many hundreds of years. Modern Welsh speakers would recognise some of it, just as we recognise old and middle English as being not a million miles from what we speak today,.
However, to take a leap forward into history, further analysis of the place names of Galloway and Carrick shows that by the eighth century AD there were also three groups of Anglian settlements in this area, each radiating from strategic and administrative centres. 1 From the stronghold of Buittle near Dalbeattie, a cluster of parishes controlled the Solway coast. Inland of Buittle lies the parish of Kelton, or calf village, which place has a long history as a strategic cross-roads where the Roman Road intersects with the route up the Glenkens 2 There is a second well defined Anglian district stretching from the Cree crossing in Penninghame down the east coast of the Machars to Whithorn (Old English Hwit-aerne) and Glasserton in the south. 3 And a third, more interesting “shire” from our point of view, lay in Carrick: five mediaeval parishes running southwards from Maybole, with Church dedications to St Oswald and St Cuthbert extending southwards towards Ballantrae. Even the name Merrick derives from Old English. The conclusions reached are that Angles settled in Galloway in the seventh and eighth centuries AD more extensively than used to be thought and mainly in places of continuing importance. Maybole was one of them.
Time marched on. And once the power of Northumbria collapsed, the kingdom of Strathclyde renewed its strength and the old balance between Briton and Angle tipped in favour of the Brits. There are many important placenames containing the Brittonic “tref” meaning homestead, and they still survive in Carrick to this day. They probably marked centres of power and wealth in these enclaves of tenth century Strathclyde . So we find :- Troquain, Threave, Barbrethan, Tranew, Tralorg, to name but a few. (There are said to be ten or eleven other than Threave) and I haven’t got them all yet. Also Guiltreehill is probably to be numbered among British names, of which more later! The Pin placenames are also P Celtic, ie Welsh British in origin.
In that short intervening period, there is literary evidence that a host of Gaelic place names had come into existence. A multitude of topographical names, ie hills, streams and rivers, but with relatively few habitation names suggest that they were the work of the peasantry, settlers who were working on the land and claiming it for their own by dint of possession. But that isn’t the whole story and even the personal names of the upper classes had – in quite a short space of time – become Gaelicised. It seems to have been literally the language rather than the population that changed. It was as though Gaelic had suddenly become fashionable. But the Gaelic speaking kindreds of Galloway and Carrick preserved traces of their British descent, not least in place names, well into the high middle ages and beyond. Some – like Barbrethan, Troquain and Threave have persisted even longer. But let’s sidestep a minute and look in a bit more detail at the place names of Kirkmichael and how they illustrate some of this.
Kirkmichael House has a long and distinguished history, as has the church (this one the newest of three or more buildings on the same site, continuously since the Mediaeval period) and there is a notebook which describes life in the manse of Kirkmichael about 1720 when Mr James Laurie was ordained minister, and Kirkmichael was a remote parish with a population of 700 souls.
At
that time, the manse itself was by no means the grander building of later
times, but was instead, a small thatched house with a kailyard in front,
narrow windows, half glazed, thick walls, and four rooms divided by wooden
partitions. Here lived the minister, his wife Ann, and their
children, four boys and three girls as well as the minister’s sister,
Betty. There were besides three women servants, a serving man and a herd
lassie who slept over the byre.
Coals are brought and peats for fuel. Linen is bleached. Shoemakers come and make shoes for family, men and maids; sometimes the weaver is paid in grain, or skin, the smith is likewise sometimes paid in meal. Tea drinking is becoming fashionable and Mr Laurie buys a set of earthenware to drink it out of. In Edinburgh he buys seed for his flower borders: “Africa Marigold, sunflower, jelly flower, luppyns, double holly oaks, bella donna “and others. Ale is brewed at home, but he buys in wine. The manse may be cramped but he likes to do himself well. He is a fairly prosperous man, a man of some standing in the community. Learning is a great thing and he has books which he lends to his friends, including the sons of local lairds. So much for life in the early 1700s. But our house wasn’t built then. Still, when we had occasion to take down a bit of wall, to build an extension some years ago, we found the stones of a much older house, a lintel, a windowsill, used as infill in the wall. Where from? From one of those much older cottages perhaps? Within the memory of people still alive in the village, there was another “village.” The old people called it the old village, though maybe it wasn’t quite a village but one of those old “clachans” of which there were many, surrounding what we now know as the village. This one ran along the road towards Crosshill, towards Merkland, and the remains of the Waukmill, where the cottage woven fabric was stretched. There is little left of it now, though the old mill remains, a shell of stones, down by the river at Merkland, impossibly small. Incidentally, it is possible to trace the whole history of the parish through its mills (I think someone is actually doing it for Ayrshire) – whether they be corn mills, wauk mills, etc .
Like so much else in Kirkmichael, habitation seems
Some distance to the south of the village is our little cluster of Welsh British names. Old sites of habitation, older than the village, older then Gaelic names like Barskelly, and Attiquin, and Bargannock. Threave, Barbrethan, (literally the height of the British) and Tranew and Troquain go back a long long way to those early British P Celtic speaking inhabitants, in other words the tribes the Romans knew as the Novantes (and could never quite subdue).
Kirkmichael House itself sits on a natural ridge, not a man made knowe or dun, but a natural height which may have been “tinkered with” to improve its defenses. This has been put forward as an argument for the house itself being of no great age, but, this is as daft as proposing no great age for Edinburgh Castle on the grounds that it sits on top of a purely natural volcanic plug. The Celts (p and q!) liked defensive positions. Within the Victorian house is a seventeenth century house, and buried deep in that is something older yet. Written records go back to the eleventh or twelve century. But the surrounding place names suggest something older still, at least going back to the time of the Scots Gaels and perhaps even further. Nearby is a Fairy Knowe. Most Fairy Knowes have nothing to do with the Fairies, and this one hasn’t either. Instead it comes from the Scots Gaelic Faire, meaning watch or guard hill. But a guard hill for what? Most Fairy Knowes or Hills are strategically placed near castles or forts of some sort. Fairy Knowe is strategically placed near Kirkmichael house, looking towards Maybole, commanding fine views over the surrounding countryside. To the North is Drumore, the big ridge. The name suggests an outlying rampart. West of Kirkmichael House is Auchenairney or the Field of Sloes, and more interestingly within Kirkmichael Village is a cottage, of no huge age itself, called Clawbeg. But the name itself is apparently much older than the cottage – it’s a mixture of Welsh and Scots Gaelic and means the little boundary ditch, or little wall or little rampart. Again, boundary ditch, or wall or rampart of what?
Descriptively Port Cheek (within the village) means the harbour where the river flows out of the hollow. And it does. And the burn is the Dyrock, which presumably also has an “Oaken” connection. I could go on, with Arnsow – the height of the wise man or sage, Dalduff, the dark field, Ballycoach, the town of the wood, Barskelly, the top of the bare rock, Drumfad, the hill of peat, and so on and so on. These were people who were describing and naming a landscape in which they lived and worked and were occasionally referring to people they thought of as “others” (“the place where the Brits live”) even when those others had been here much much longer. The names are, if we pay attention, still describing the place to us, even as we say them.There are no dramatic conclusions to be drawn. All we can say for sure is that we are looking at a time of huge social change which is fascinatingly reflected in changing placenames. And that almost all the places of settlement round about are going to be much much older than the buildings thereon! To finish:- A salutary story – an English friend had been told that Guiltreehill outside the village had been a gallows hill. But it seemed very unlikely. Justice, if any, would be administered in Maybole, and not up in the fastnesses of Guiltreehill. On investigation it seems more likely that the “tree” is another British Tref, or house. The Guil element, may have something to do with shining, or white. Gil-tref means hill of the white or shining house. Sometimes, as in Whithorn, the very fact of a building being painted white would distinguish it, since this was so unusual. But there may be a yet more interesting explanation for Guiltreehill. Lead was mined up there, but more importantly, Silver was also mined up there. There is a tradition of items retained in the village made of silver from Ballycoach up on Guiltreehill, though I’ve never seen any. But the mine was a very old one. And as I said earlier, the British were miners, if they were anything. So maybe the shining house was the place that the silver came from. Better than the gallows any day. |
|
 |
Catherine Lucy Czerkawska is a resident
of Kirkmichael and accomplished writer. Her works include
novels, plays for
theatre and BBC radio, television drama, short stories, articles and
creative content of all kinds.
See also
Catherine's story about the 200 year old Kirkmichael school records saved
from the bonfire. |
During the time that we call
prehistory, ie before written records, the ancient peoples of the island
of Britain told their story only in the stones (and just occasionally in
the bones and the wood, the pottery, and the beads) they left behind them.
We know that initially these very earliest (Mesolithic) inhabitants were
nomads who had walked to Britain across what is now the southern part of
the North Sea. But we know that across the millennia this stone age
culture changed. Farming techniques developed or more likely were
introduced by other peoples moving west, now by boat. And over a long
period of time, the culture flowered into something sophisticated enough
to produce Stonehenge and Avebury and Maeshowe. Our most vivid
reconstruction of actual stone age life comes from Skara Brae in the
Orkneys where what was essentially a stone age village survived to become
an interesting (but perhaps not typical!) anomaly. 
They were warriors, people who loved horses, fighters, craftspeople,
poets and with a multitude of Gods and Goddesses, some more powerful than
others. They believed in the spirit of place, sacred hills, streams,
springs and wells. But this word Celtic is misleading. It makes us think
of cohesion, one people. But it is only a clumsy way of describing
linguistic similarities between many many different tribes with many
different allegiances, gods, and customs. And just as there were cultural
differences between the Celts who settled in Britain and those who
circumnavigated Britain in the early Iron Age and settled in Ireland,
there were linguistic differences between them too, but we have no way of
knowing whether they developed in situ – or were brought here to begin
with. Certainly it is now thought that the language spoken by the Irish
Celts was older than that spoken by British Celts. And in all the Celtic
languages there are buried words that belong perhaps to some older, quite
different tongue. 
After that, of course, came the Norsemen (in waves, the history books
insist on telling us!) who not only raped and plundered, but also
colonised and eventually reinforced the power of the Gallovidian Angles as
a ruling class. But by then the Angles had also managed to achieve an
uneasy (or perhaps easy, who knows?) power balance with their British
neighbours. The Britons were by tradition cattle and horse breeders to
whom the hill pastures were a natural habitat. They were also,
interestingly enough, miners and occupied the areas where silver could be
extracted and gold panned in the streams. Both peoples hunted and fished
but this was no problem because there was an abundance of wildlife and
game. The seclusion of one settlement from another by wide tracts of
forest probably helped to maintain the peace between these very different
peoples. 
And here
comes a really interesting time. For in the early 10th century
Galloway and Carrick were divided between British and Anglian enclaves.
Then, comes an information gap of about 100 years – a mini dark age, of a
certain amount of turbulence when Anglian power was waning. And oddly
enough when records begin properly again that Anglo-Brittonic culture has
been replaced by something quite different! The Scots had come (from
Ireland!) with a vengeance and the huge and powerful spread of Gaelic
place names had happened, with great speed. In the first 20 years of the
eleventh century the distribution of power in this part of the world
changed enormously. The kingdom of the Scots (for which read Irish!) was
established and they brought with them a language that was – for some
reason – hugely vital. Why would be an interesting study all by itself.
The minister was
funded by the local people, lairds and farmers, but sometimes his stipend
was hard to come by. It seems to have been very hard for him to get
his parishioners, even the wealthy ones, to pay to keep the manse in a
good state of repair. From 1711 – 1732 James Laurie noted down memoranda
of his income, his expenses and the details of his daily life. In winter
the women, including Ann, and Betty were engaged in making yarn and thread
which they would then have woven into cloth for their own purposes, or in
some cases they would sell it on. There were plenty of weavers in the
village. Or near it. 
