SNSBI Spring Conference 2025

The 2025 SNSBI spring conference took place at the Stirling Court Hotel in Stirling on 11-14 April 2025. The second circular is here. The programme in pdf form is here.

Friday 11 April

Evening Lecture: 1930-2100 Prof. Richard Oram, University of Stirling

‘From Mountain to Moss and Forest: People, land, and Environment in Stirling and the Forth Valley’

Saturday 12 April

Saturday morning session 1: 0930-1100

Abigail Lloyd

‘A mound by any other name? Accounting for difference in place-names within the Mercian borders’

This paper follows on from a country-wide study of three early medieval hill-terms: berg (OE/OScan), crug (OE/Brit) and dūn (OE). The advantage of national scope, and comparing one oronym with another across regions, is that distinctive patterning emerges in the distributions of these elements, both geographically and chronologically. OE/OScan berg was used to refer to artificial or burial mounds alongside references to natural features. The almost complete absence of berg-names in Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire is striking, particularly when contrasted with the density of occurrence in Worcestershire and Warwickshire. The obvious alternative OE element for a mound – hlāw – is in inverse relationship, densely represented in the northern regions and hardly in the southern. Western Mercia is firmly split north-south. The extent to which OE berg and hlāw might have referred respectively to prehistoric and early medieval mounds needs to be looked at afresh in light of this data (Grinsell 1959; Gelling 1978; Kitson 1995; Semple 2013; Gelling & Cole 2014/2000). It is also relevant to any archaeological evidence surviving in this area. Meanwhile, OE/Brit crug, also referencing artificial mounds and natural hills that resemble such mounds, is surprisingly absent from this border region. This engages questions surrounding the survival of Brittonic speech and the use of Brittonic elements in Old English place-naming, or, indeed, ongoing influence from across the border (Jackson 1953, Baker 2022). A national dataset also enables a closer look at recurrent compounding. The patterns in the elements collocating with berg, crug, or hlāw in this case, enable a more nuanced understanding of what these three signified, how they were used in place-naming and by whom. Recurrent compounds are a phenomenon much talked about in the particular context of understanding Mercia (Gelling 1990, 1992; Blair 2018). The debate ranges over whether one is looking at a centralised, administrative naming-phenomenon, or not. It is worth considering again what else recurrency might suggest and who else might be employing recurrent terms in their naming practices (Parsons 2022).

Conchubhar Ó Crualaoich

‘Some placename evidence for settlers from Wales among the Anglo-Norman colonisers in Ireland’.

The general use of the term Anglo-Norman by Irish historians and toponymists reflects the central role of English and Norman French culture in the late 12th-century invasion and subsequent colonisation of the island. This influence is found in the names of thousands of townlands, the smallest administrative units in Ireland, whether they exist in something close to their original form – such as Tullerstown (< Fr. Toulouse) in Co. Wexford and Staffordstown (< Eng. Stafford) in Co. Meath – or under an Irish coat owing to the widespread linguistic assimilation of the colony, e.g. Ballybunnion/Baile an Bhuinneánaigh (< Bunyan) in Co. Kerry and Ballinvronig/Baile an Bhrúnaigh (< Browne) in Co. Cork. However, although generally satisfactory in an Irish toponymic context, this umbrella term Anglo-Norman tends to downplay the native Welsh and Cambro-Norman participation in the invasion and their presence in the early colony. The intention of this paper is to look at some townland names that possibly contain names or surnames of native Welsh and Cambro-Norman origin.

Jake King

‘The names of the islands in Loch Lomond’

Loch Lomond is the largest inland body of water in Great Britain, straddling the counties of Argyll, Dumbartonshire, and Stirlingshire. It contains several larger islands and many smaller ones, some of which have vanished over time. The linguistic record includes several fascinating manuscripts that list the names of these islands, often with translations from the Gaelic. These sources reveal a linguistic landscape in which many of the islands have changed names multiple times, typically within a Gaelic and Scots context. These unusual toponymic and physical conditions present a challenge to unravel.

Saturday morning session 2: 1130-1300

Peter Kitson

‘On n-stem adjectives, south-western river-names, and the Ravenna Cosmography’

At Bridgend in 2023 from an Indo-European perspective I made the general statement that Romano-British river-names attested in a mix of grammatically feminine and masculine (or neuter) forms, plus most of those only attested as if masculine, are likely to have been feminine in fact. Now I argue in particular that they were British ōn-stems, so should properly have been represented in Latin by the third declension, but Celtic sound-change had made them strike Latin ears as belonging to the second declension, which is masculine and neuter. There are good etymological reasons why ōn-stems ought to have been productive in river-names. Sound-change within Brittonic then turned their final syllable to the front vowel present in English names like Meavy and Welsh names like Ewenni. Surprisingly this does not seem to have been noticed by previous scholars. (If I am wrong in this I hope someone present will correct me!) But the explanation of the south-western river-names offered tentatively by Ekwall and positively by Sir Ifor Williams and R. J. Thomas is not compatible with Jackson’s account of phonetic developments. Origin in ōn-stems not only fits that but explains why such names are found in English only in the south-west. Only there did Anglo-Saxons arrive so late that the characteristic -n- had been lost from British speech. Corresponding names in other areas were borrowed simply as Old English weak feminines, “weak” being the label in Germanic philology for the n-declension; thus Derventiō(n-) > Deorwente/-an. A corollary is that the name of the Trent was not as widely accepted Trisantona, proposed by Henry Bradley emending a corrupt phrase in the text of Tacitus, but Trisantō(n-) as actually attested in both the Greek and Latin texts of Ptolemy (of course only the Greek specifies length of vowel). One reason why British ōn-stem river-names have not been recognized is that Rivet and Smith’s touch was less sure with the Ravenna Cosmography than with other sources. They made bad choices both of what to believe and of what to disbelieve in the work of Louis Dillemann.

John Baker

‘Assembly place-names: some Spelthorny issues’

In early medieval England, the regulation of local society and justice was carried out at open air venues of public assembly. The value of place-names in enhancing our understanding of these sites and the practices associated with them has long been recognised. Interdisciplinary studies have made use of the names of known assembly sites (including hundred or wapentake meeting-places), and place-names that refer to public assembly (containing elements such as OE/ON þing ‘assembly’, OE (ge)mōt ‘meeting’, and OE spell ‘speech’). This paper focuses on the latter, a corpus of place-names particularly characterised by recurrent compounds, such as (ge)mōt-hlāw and þing-haugr. This feature of the material has received relatively little attention in wider analyses of toponymy as an indicator of the location and nature of assembly sites – an oversight that may sometimes have blurred assessments of the implications of such names. This paper explores several compounds that seem to occur multiple times in place-names, considering some possible misidentifications, latecomers and outright imposters. In doing so, it reassesses the significance of that recurrence and its value in analysing the physical characteristics of assembly places.

Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

‘The etymology of the place-name Stirling revisited’

This paper revisits the etymology of the challenging place-name Stirling NS790940. It builds upon Thomas Owen Clancy’s (2017) recent article which advances our understanding of the derivation of this compound Gaelic name, especially with respect to the first element which can confidently be traced to earlier Gaelic srib (~sreb) ‘stream’. The focus of this paper is on the more problematic second element which is fundamentally different in Gaelic and non-Gaelic forms. The derivation of the second element from linn ‘pool’ is difficult to reconcile with the Gaelic forms, which do not end in a final nasal. This paper considers the Gaelic forms in more detail than has hitherto been attempted and suggests a new derivation for the second element which allows us to reconcile the Gaelic and non-Gaelic forms with vocalic and consonantal auslaut respectively.

Saturday afternoon session 1: 1400-1530

Sofia Evemalm-Graham

‘Death and place-names on Iona’

Aengus Ó Fionnagáin

‘The Schools Folklore Collection and minor placenames in Ireland’

In 1937 students in c.5000 primary schools in Ireland were asked to collect folklore in their local areas. A booklet detailing 55 different areas of enquiry was distributed to all the schools. Under the heading ‘Local Place-Names’, students were asked to collect the ‘Names of fields, streams, hollows and heights, rocks, old bushes, on your farm at home.’ Approximately 740,000 manuscript pages of folklore were collected in total. In most schools at least one student provided a list of field names and other microtoponyms in their area; this was often the first time these names had been recorded. This archive constitutes the only large-scale survey of Ireland’s microtoponymy, and compliments the more localised surveys carried out by professional researchers and community groups in various parts of Ireland over the last 50 years. This paper seeks to highlight the value of this material but also examine the challenges of interpreting names which were often recorded using an ad hoc combination of English and Irish orthography by schoolchildren. In addition, the question of how representative or otherwise the material collected in 1937-8 was of the range of names in use at the time will be addressed. The material collected in one county will be examined in some detail in this paper, with a sample comparison of two neighbouring counties which will allow for some more general extrapolation of the size and nature of the collection.

Phil Baarda

‘The Drama of Place: a creative response to place-names and identity’

Place-names presumably had an obvious and distinctive meaning to the people who coined or inherited them, but today their significance might be obscure or unknown or controversial or even irrelevant. I’m undertaking a Masters by Research through the University of the Highlands and Islands, looking at place-names and the stories they tell, and what they mean to people and communities nowadays. The MRes is asking many questions to stimulate a creative response: does knowing the derivation of place-names affect one’s sense of identity? If so, how and to what degree is this the case? If people had the choice, what they want to call a place now? In our so-called post-colonial time, how and should place-names – as seemingly fixed artefacts of our past – be scrutinised and re-imagined into our future? A stage play is one of the outputs to this MRes – and I will be outlining how I’ve been tackling the research, and where my questions have taken me. Some of the early research produced a series of short, downloadable audio dramas: Our Place Your Place – stories behind the names of where we live

Saturday afternoon session 2: 1600-1730

Peder Gammeltoft

‘Bridging past and present: AI-driven named entity recognition on medieval onomaticons’

In recent years, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cultural heritage research has opened unprecedented possibilities for processing and analyzing historical materials. This paper explores the role of AI, particularly Named Entity Recognition (NER), in identifying and standardizing both place names and personal names within medieval Norwegian texts. By harnessing advanced language models and machine learning techniques, NER systems address the challenges of inconsistent spellings, archaic forms, and multilingual data characteristic of medieval documents. Focusing on the Diplomatarium Norvegicum, a corpus of medieval Norwegian charters, this study demonstrates how AI extracts and contextualizes place and personal names, and aligns them to modern standardized name forms for use in modern databases such as the Stadnamnportalen. These technologies enable accurate mapping between historical and contemporary name forms, enhancing accessibility and usability for researchers and the public. The implementation integrates spelling alignment and metadata enrichment, ensuring that entities maintain their linguistic and historical integrity while linking them to modern equivalents. This approach reduces processing times compared to traditional methods and offers a scalable model applicable to similar historical datasets worldwide, showcasing the universal potential of AI in cultural heritage digitization. However, challenges such as “hallucinated” outputs and the need for human oversight (HITL/XITL) highlight the importance of expert validation in AI-assisted workflows. This paper contributes to the discourse on digitizing cultural heritage by illustrating how AI not only preserves historical authenticity but also bridges the gap between traditional archives and digital innovation. By facilitating the analysis and dissemination of medieval place and personal name data, this work feeds directly into the Stadnamnportalen project, underscoring the transformative impact of AI on unlocking new research opportunities and fostering public engagement with historical materials.

Keith Briggs

‘Some lexical evidence from Suffolk place-names’

One of the motivations for the study of place-names has always been the evidence it can provide for the history and development of the English lexis. Initially the main interest was in Old English, but subsequently much valuable evidence for Middle English (ME) has emerged. This talk will focus on some some Suffolk examples in which place-names provide either antedatings to dictionary data, or useful semantic evidence, for some rare or poorly understood ME terms. Examples will include some or all of evesdrop ‘gutter’, blō ‘blue-black, dark-coloured’, clint ‘?slope’, grindle ‘small narrow gully’, offal ‘?land covered by trash’, scout ‘a projecting piece of land’, slicht ‘smooth or level land’, slōth ‘path, trail’, and waltūn ‘?walled enclosure’.

Kate Murphy

‘Sifting through the Civil Survey: the minor boundary placenames of County Wexford’

Paul Tempan

Report: ‘Belfast Street-name project’

Book launch and wine reception 1730-1815

The Survey of Scottish Place-Names IX: Simon Taylor and Eila Williamson with Carole Hough, The Place-Names of Berwickshire vol. 1: The Tweedside Parishes

Sunday 13 April

Sunday morning session 1: 0900-1030

Chris Lewis

From Lorn to Lewes: the transferred name Cuilfail’

One of the commonest ways of naming houses in Britain has been the re-use of a place-name transferred from elsewhere. The motivations of those choosing transferred names encompass individual and family memory, public and private commemoration, social imitation and aspiration, cultural knowledge, cultural appropriation, and other factors, singly or in combination. House-naming from other places was especially common in the 1920s and 1930s as the rising tide of first-time home-ownership led to quite modest suburban houses being named, but the roots of such practices can be seen earlier in larger houses built and owned at the wealthier end of the middle-class spectrum. The transferred names were often drawn from holiday areas across the British Isles, especially smaller resorts that were both scenic and had social cachet. The names of individual houses given by owner-occupiers in such circumstances are strikingly different from the names of larger housing developments – whether Victorian terraces, streets of identical semi-detacheds, or inter-war speculative estates. Builders’ and developers’ names had other imperatives which tended strongly towards an unadventurous but aspirational blandness that was evidently thought attractive to investors or tenants. The example considered here, as well as being of intrinsic Scottish interest, addresses some wider issues about transferred house-names. It has a double twist. The original Cuilfail, in the historic district of Lorn, Argyllshire, was not a ‘place’ in the ordinary sense but a hotel. The origin of the name will itself bear some examination. And the destination of the transferred name, in the East Sussex county town of Lewes, was not a house but a small housing estate. It emerges that the Cuilfail Inn occupied a particular social and cultural niche in the late nineteenth century which explains the transfer of its name to Lewes. Continuing the story, the transplanted name has spread beyond its original referent and taken on a life of its own in Lewes.

Justin Ó Gliasáin

‘Scottish influence on placenames in Inishowen and Raphoe, County Donegal’

Although the majority of administrative placenames in Ulster are of Irish-language origin, the Scottish influence on the region’s toponymy, largely stemming from the Ulster Plantation, is notable. This influence on both townland and minor names in Ulster has been investigated in two articles by McKay in Ainm (2001 & 2016). This paper aims to take a closer look at Scottish impact on the namescape in the Baronies of Raphoe (Raphoe North and South) and Inishowen (Inishowen East and West) in County Donegal, examining both townland and minor names. As part of the Ulster Plantation, land was granted in the precincts of Portlough and Lifford, an area which is roughly contiguous to the modern Baronies of Raphoe North and Raphoe South. Lands in Portlough were granted to Scottish settlers, and while Lifford was granted mostly to settlers of English extraction, many of the under-tenants were of Scottish origin. In contrast, Inishowen was treated differently, being granted entirely to Arthur Chichester, the English Lord Deputy of Ireland. Despite these different settlement patterns, Scottish influence on placenames is evident throughout the area, to varying degrees. This paper aims to explore the impact of Scottish settlers on the toponomy of these baronies and examines the varying extent of that influence across the region. Among the themes which will be explored are placenames containing Scots elements, Scottish surnames and personal names in placenames, as well as “Scotch” and “Irish” subdivisions and placenames transplanted from Scotland. As well as townland names, microtoponyms from sources including historic Ordnance Survey Maps, The Schools’ Folklore Collection and The Registry of Deeds will be examined.

Thomas Owen Clancy

Dark Waters and Bright: place-names of the coalfield communities

This paper briefly introduces the online resource created as part of a Heritage Lottery Funded project on the place-names of five parishes in what is now East Ayrshire. As well as introducing the resource (still a work in progress), it will outline some aspects of the names in this region, considering the contributions of various languages to the namescape, from the earliest river names up to the modern period. Some of the challenges of addressing names in a post-industrial landscape, and of some of the methodologies followed in the project, will also be discussed.

Pat McKay

Report: ‘The Ulster Place-Name Society: the future’

Sunday morning session 2: 1100-1200

Bill Patterson

‘Eldbotle and other place-names in Dirleton parish, East Lothian’

An intended five-minute Zoom discussion on the theme of names of places once important, now almost forgotten, turned into a larger quest with unexpected complications. Eldbotle was a major estate in a coastal parish then called Golyn, with a castle on record in the mid to late 12th century, before replacement by a massive stone structure at Dirleton. The site of the vetus castellum is officially unknown, but it was likely to have been a short-life wooden construction on a motte, and a candidate has been revealed to view by clearance of scrub woodland for the Renaissance Club golf course. Consideration of major landform change by windblown sand since the High Middle Ages leads to new possibilities for the specific in the name Eldbotle. The possible castle motte, basically a small volcanic plug, is on record only since the late 18th century, with forms Torbucklin Hill and Strabauchlinn Knowe (OS since 1854). If the former is the more reliable the original derivation is likely to be northern Brittonic (Cumbric) referring to ‘mound (by) buck or cattle pool’. However, if the name refers to a herdsman (ScG buachaille, Welsh bugail) there are intriguing similarities between the prominent headland location and other ‘herdsman’ places including Barnbougle, West Lothian, and Buachailean with a commanding view over the Firth of Clyde. The talk will also touch on other names in the parish, including Gullane (Brittonic or Gaelic?), Dirleton OE), Fidra (Norse) and Kilmurdie – definitely Gaelic, but not quite what it seems.

Peter McNiven

‘Place-names of the Stirling area and Menteith’

excursion to Dunblane and Doune 1315-1730