The making of Britain / Arch. Geikie.

  • Archibald Geikie
Date:
[1887?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The making of Britain / Arch. Geikie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    bridge over these pools with doors, windows, and thatch from the cottage roofs; and how, with the assistance of their compatriots in Stirling Castle, they were so far successful that Clif- ford’s troop of horse, and, possibly, some more of the English army, got safely over to the hard ground beyond. We thus learn that Bruce’s famous device of the “ pots ” was only an ex- tension of the kind of defence that nature had already provided for him. The ground on his left, now so dry and so richly cultivated, was then covered with impassable bogs and sheets of water ; and the huge army of Ed ward was consequently compelled to crowd its attack into the narrow space between these bogs and the higher grounds on Bruce’s right. (2) Another wide field of inquiry for information touching changes in the aspect of the country is supplied by the etymology of place-names. These names, at least those of them that date from old times, possess a peculiar value and interest as abiding records of the people who gave them, and also, in many cases, of the circumstances in which they were given. We are at present concerned only with those that embody some physical fact in the topo- graphy. Many of these are as appro- priate now as they were at first; for the features to which they were applied have remained unaltered. Ben Nevis is as truly the “Hill of Heaven” to- day as when the earliest Celtic tribe looked up to it from the glens below. The big stones on the summit of Pen- maenmawr still stand as memorials of the British people who erected and named them. But in innumerable instances the appositeness of the designation has been lost. The name has, in fact, been moi’e permanent than the fea- ture to which it was applied. The one has survived in daily speech from generation to generation ; the other has wholly passed away. By com- paring the descriptive epithet in the name with the present aspect of the locality, some indication, or even. perhaps, some measure of the nature and amount of the changes in the topography, may still be recovered. Now in researches of this kind the liability to blunder is so great, and many able writers have blundered so egregiously, that the inquiry ought not to be entered upon without due preparation, and should not be con- tinued without constant exercise of the most scrupulous caution. The great danger of being betrayed into error by the plausibilities of phonetic etymology should never for a moment be lost sight of. Where possible the earliest form of the name should be recovered, for in the course of time local names are apt to be so corrupted as to lose all obvious trace of their original orthography. The Celtic place-names are as a whole singularly descriptive. The Celtic tribes, indeed, have manifested, in that respect, a keener appreciation of landscape and a more poetical eye for nature than their Saxon succes- sors. Who that has ever stood beneath the sombre shadow of the cloud that so often rests on the shoulders of the Grampians will fail to recognise the peculiar fitness of the Gaelic name for the highest summit of the chain— Ben-na-muich-dubh, “ the mountain of dark gloom ” ? Or who has ever watched the Atlantic billows bursting into white foam against the cliffs of Ardnamurchan and did not acknow- ledge that only a poetic race could have named the place “the headland of the great sea.” The colours of mountain and river have been seized upon by these people as descriptive characters that have suggested local names. Swiftness and sluggishness of flow have furnished discriminating epithets for rivers. Moors, forests, woodlands, copses, groups of trees, solitary bushes, lakes, mosses, cliffs, gullies, even single boulders, have received names which record some aspect or character that struck the im>agination of the old Celt. Many of these names have never found a place on any map, but they are well
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