It
has been some time since I blogged about placenames but one aspect
that particularly interests me is how taking a group of nearby names
into consideration, or even just a pair, can help reveal new
insights.
The
example that I have been pondering recently regards the two hills at
the northern end of Berneray which
are shown on the latest Ordnance Survey (OS) map as Beinn Shlèibhe
(with it’s 93m trig point) and Beinn Ghainche. These are usually rendered in English as Ben Leva and
Sandhill, although Moor Hill is
also sometimes seen for the first of them.
At
the time of the first OS mapping of Harris in the mid 1870s the Name Books
provide us with an earlier name for Sandhill that came from Captain Otter's admiralty chart of 1857 and, more significantly, what they called the ’Old Map’.
This is a reference to the wonderful work of William Bald performed
in 1804/1805 under the watchful eye of his master (the celebrated
mapmaker Mr Ainslie) on behalf of one ’Alexander Hulme’.
This was
Alexander Hulme MACLEOD, the anglophile son of Captain MacLeod
of Berneray who dumped his family name such
was his ambition to remove any
reference to his roots from his personage. This attitude
is important because it perhaps explains Bald’s anglicisation of placenames
on his otherwise astonishingly accurate map of the Estate of Harris.
The map title may be seen at:
The
earlier name referred to by the OS is Green Hill and that name stuck until it was replaced
by Sandhill at some point during the two decades separating the 1857
chart and the 1876 map.
It stuck, but it was quite possibly wrong.
If
one looks closely at Bald’s map it is manifest that the name is
written as ’Creen Hill’. There are two examples of the capital
letter ’G’ in close proximity and the distinction between them and the
capital ’C’ is unequivocal. There is also a capital 'C' at the clachan of 'Crockgunne' for comparison and it is a perfect match. Bald provided Moor Hill and Creen
Hill for his master's client and that is, I believe, no mistake:
https://maps.nls.uk/view/74400301#zoom=7&lat=2178&lon=4133&layers=BT
What
we have for sure is a big hill and an adjacent little hill. So what is the origin of
’Moor’ and ’Creen’, as rendered into English some two-hundred
and twenty years ago? My (very) tentative conjecture is that they could come
from Mor, meaning big, and Crìon
meaning “little
or diminutive”.
There may well be
alternative manglings of Gaelic that lead to the anglicisation ’Creen’ but
this is one possibility that appears as if it might fit.
Oh,
and as ’sleibhe’ can mean a ’mountain of the highest magnitude’
(and
Beinn Shleibhe is indeed the highest peak in Berneray)
does that not also
add weight to the
suggestion that what
we may well have here is a
big/little pairing, rather
than a moor/green one? I think it's worth considering.
I’ll
leave what appears to
be the relatively
recent adoption of Sand Hill for others to ponder, although the area is certainly susceptible to seasonal sand blow:
