Walking and Climbing

Having recently started to explore the Southern Uplands, I'd really love to know what some of the hill names mean. Examples that immediately spring to mind are:

Law- presumably Law means Hill but does it refer to any particular sort of hill? And what language does Law come from? Not Gaelic I presume but would it be Scots or border dialect?

Merrick- no idea what it means.  

Lowther- presumably no connection with the Lowther estate in the Lakes?

Does anyone know? Is there a reliable source of hill meanings for the Southern Upland hills out there somewhere?

Heh heh... you picked probably the most difficult area of placenames to unravel... especially in the Galloway Hills!

The oldest language that can be detected is Gaelic, and you can bet that both Scots and Irish Gaelic would have been used, and I wouldn't put it past the occasional Manx Gaelic speaker to reach the area. It's thought that at least some Brythonic Celtic influence was felt in the area... basically... the original Welsh-type language that was once spoken in Cumbria. Norse invaders brought yet another layer of language, as did the Norman/French when they began to push from England into Scotland. In due course, English developed as a recogniseable language and also stamped itself into placenames, and then everything got mis-represented and mis-spelt by the time anyone tried to write it all down and put it on maps.

Most of the placenames you see in the Galloway Hills are just plain bizarre, but some of them might be unravelled as follows...

Millfore... for example... might derive from Mull Fhuar... Gaelic for Cold Hill.

Curlywee... definitely an odd one... might derive from Cor na Gaeth... Hill of the Wind.

Placename elements such as Rig, Clint, Fell and Holm are all from the Norse.

Of course, if you can't be bothered to unravel them all... just enjoy them... Craigeazle, Mullwharchar, Point of the Snibe, Buckdas of Cairnbaber, Clints of the Buss, Shalloch on Minnoch, Nieve of the Spit, Rig of the Jarkness, The Rhinns of Kells, and The Range of the Awful Hand!

Strange isn't it that the first nations in several continents used descriptions like Hill of winds and Smoky(Misty)Mountains but the more recently mountains were named/altered after the first recorded climbers.

I personally like the name Great Cock up in the Lakes, something to do with a Woodcock Valley according to Wiki.

Thanks for the info, Paddy- that's very informative.

 I do love some of the names. Clint of Buses is particularly fab I think!

 I'd still like to know where Law orignated from if anyone knows?

A Law is a rounded hill.....

Good resource here Scottish Place Name Society (http://http://www.spns.org.uk/).

Cheers, David

Or even the BMC book all about Scottish hill names As Paddy said they're a serious mess in terms of the languages invovled, and very rare in being so.

From which: Law = basically the archetypal Scots hill world from anglo saxon etc.  (Scots here being the english diallect + plenty of discussion.).

Craig seems to be an odd hybrid of between creag and crag, one being Gaelic and the other of course English. (same thing though.). Except it gets put both before (Gaelic) and after (English etc) things in names!  

Martin Carpenter wrote (see)

From which: Law = basically the archetypal Scots hill world from anglo saxon etc.  (Scots here being the english diallect + plenty of discussion.).

Mike fae Dundee wrote (see)

As the hill in the centre of Dundee is called 'The Law', i should know the meaning. Simply 'hill' in Scots. A seperate language from English, and not simply a 'dialect' as Martin says.

Just did a quick read up on this... apparently 'Scots' is quite distinct from Scottish Gaelic, which I didn't know before. Apparently, Scots is much more closely related to older variants of English (like the Old English apparently spoken by the anglo-saxons) and is a Germanic language, unlike Scottish Gaelic which is a Celtic language.

So 'law' might have come from Scottish Gaelic (and hence from old Irish Gaelic, or somesuch) but probably not from Scots which would have come from Old English and been more likely to include more familiar sounding words like 'hyll'  (have a look at http://www.dsl.ac.uk/ for an example of Scots).

I speak Scots, Serriadh. Ken whit a mean?

At school we were taught in Dundee that 'our' Law was Scots, which is closely linked to Old English.

The dictionary of the Scots Language says that the word "Law" comes from the northern (i.e. Anglian as opposed to Saxon) version of Middle English, which is where The Scots (not Gaelic) language comes from too. There are hills called "something or orther Law" scattered all over central and southern Scotland e.. North Berwick Law.

On the other hand, the word craig, crag, creag is undoubtedly of Celtic origin - Gaelic or Brethonic (From which modern Welsh desended). It is found in Welsh as "Cerraig" (I think, but stand to be corrected) and is certainly not English of any variety. The reason that it is found widespread in northern England is that Brrethonic (and maybe even Gaelic) was spoken widely there until about a thousand years ago. In fact, languages related to Gaelic and Welsh were probably spoken over the whole of England in Roman times.

Mike fae Dundee wrote (see)

I speak Scots, Serriadh. Ken whit a mean?

At school we were taught in Dundee that 'our' Law was Scots, which is closely linked to Old English.

Yay, looks like I've found some evidence to back that one up, which is nice. There's an Old English 'hláw' meaning burial mound, which seems to have ended up meaning hill in more recent variants of the language, like Scots. Interesting stuff.

Guess that would explain why it was so difficuly trying to find a similar word in Gaelic dictionaries

Indeed

It could have been Norse or Cumbric too mind. Its amazing really - the BMC book lists a little under 120 generic words for hills of one form or another.  

Although I guess even England does have a decent, if smaller, number too and then Wales has a few more of its own....