A Place-Name Weekend in Oban

The Scottish Place-Name Society conference at Oban last weekend was a real pleasure to attend: the town was looking its best in the early summer sun, there was an excellent selection of papers, and, to round things off, we had a fascinating trip out and about in the surrounding countryside of Muckairn and Glen Lonan, in which Alexander Carmichael recorded so much during the 1880s and 1890s.

My paper, on the local folklore collections made by Carmichael and the Rev. Niel Campbell (1850–1904), Church of Scotland minister of Kilchrenan and Dalavich, dovetailed nicely with the one given by Brigadier John MacFarlane. Drawing upon voluminous papers compiled by his family in Taynuilt over several generations, about history, folklore, songs, poetry, and place-names, John offered a precious glimpse into a time, not that long ago, when Muckairn was an overwhelmingly Gaelic-speaking parish. Today, there’s only himself left of the seann seòid. Ach nach math gu bheil ur leithid ann!

Denis Rixson, well known as historian of the Rough Bounds and Small Isles, offered us a rigorous wrestle with the fascinating and controversial question concerning the meaning and extent of traditional land valuation assessment units such as merklands, pennylands, ceathramhan, davachs, and more, throughout the western Gàidhealtachd. A fundamental problem was summed up in his astute comment that there is absolutely no guarantee that the extent of farms and townlands remained static throughout the centuries. (If we factor in recent historical findings concerning the nature and influence of environmental changes and population mobility and variablity over the centuries, the challenge of synthesising medieval land assessments with later documentary evidence might be even trickier than we had hitherto imagined.)

Michael Hance of the Scots Language Centre explored contemporary usages and manifestations of Lowland Scots in place-names and toponymy, making the perhaps unanswerable point that if we have, for instance, Linlithgow and Gleann Iucha on a public sign, should there not be a place for Lithgae too?

Professor Carole Hough of Glasgow University gave an exciting overview of the new AHRC-funded Scottish Toponymy in Transition project there. Having nearly finished the Place-Names of Fife, the project is on a roll. The next focus for the team is Clackmannanshire and Kinross-shire, with additional research planned on Cunninghame (North Ayrshire), Berwickshire, and Menteith, subject of Peter McNiven’s recent excellent PhD thesis.

One personal highlight was the bus trip next day around Muckairn and Glen Lonan, led by John MacFarlane. It was intriguing to see the beautifully picturesque but perhaps less epic reality behind the heroic landscape summoned up by Alexander Carmichael, a world of Ossianic champions, clan strife and legend, battles prophesied or in the past, a cradle of great men such as Iain Lom, and the supposed homeland of the ancestors of Robert Burns and John Ruskin.

As one extra bonus, I was able to spend Sunday afternoon in the newly-opened 1745 House at Dunollie Castle, poring over the MacDougall Papers. This exceptionally important archive, together with the frankly amazing Hope MacDougall Collection (undoubtedly to feature in blogs to come), should make visits to Dunollie compulsory for all those with an interest in the people, history, and culture of the western Highlands.

John MacFarlane talking the group through the site of the Battle of Daileag, fought between the MacDougalls of Dunollie and incoming Campbells.

‘Daileag was an ideal field of battle in the time of days of hand to hand encounters…’ [CW504 fo.35^v] Cruachan Beann in the background: ‘’S iomadh linn bhon d’fhuair iad còir/Air a’ bheinn is bòidhch’ r’a faicinn.’

Airds Bay – the cottage where the Carmichaels lived from 1899 to 1901 is on the left-hand side behind the trees. 'Deagh Choimhead' in the background.

A sheila-na-gig in her latest home in the walls of the most recent Taynuilt parish church.

Dùn Tamhnachan/Duntanachan, where the Rev. Archibald Clerk (1813–87) of Kilmallie was brought up.

Clach Dhiarmaid at Tòrr an Tuirc. In the foreground, so legend avers, the enclosure in which the Ossianic hero was laid to rest.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Scottish Place-Name Society conference, especially Dr Jake King who organised the conference - and also to Catherine Gillies, Project Manager at Dunollie Castle.

Mass-Murdering Ancestor of Robert Burns

As today – or rather tonight – many Scots, both at home and abroad, will celebrate Burns Night, it would not be entirely inappropriate to see what Alexander Carmichael had to say about Scotland’s most enduring poet. Try as he might – and he tried very hard indeed – to claim Robert Burns, and, therefore, by extension the genius of his song and poetry – for the Highlands (and as a Campbell to boot), Carmichael would ultimately fail in his endeavour. Carmichael based his interpretation upon the tradition that Burns’s ancestor – called Walter Campbell, Ualtair Taigh an Uillt, that is, ‘Walter of the House of the Burn’ or Burn House, as well as being known as Fear Baile an Deòir. Now, this Walter, managed to outwit a pack of strolling bards called the Cliar Sheanchain by way of a ‘sleekit’ strategy as he had failed miserably in trying to get rid of them by outdoing doing them in satirical wit and sparkling repartee. A version of this tradition was noted down by Carmichael from an old schoolmaster, Duncan MacNiven (1804–1895), on 6 July 1892, who belonged to Cnoc na h-Àird near Taynuilt.

The Ceath[a]irne-Choill came
the way. They would not have
you if you gave them enter
tainm[en]t if not they took of[f] your
stock. Fear Bhail an deor had a
sail dharaich and he was splitting
up – He placed 8 on each side
and killed them all – with the sword.
16 of the ceithirn choill – because
they dwelt in woods.

Some twenty years were to pass before Carmichael managed to write up and eventually print a version of this tradition:

Walter Campbell felled a tree in a place known since then as ‘Glac-a-Chlamhain,’ the dell of the harrier, and ‘Glac nan cliar,’ the dell of the satirists. The dell scoops across a high ridge of glacial drift. It is narrow and confined on the south at the upper end, broadening on the north and expanding downwards to a wide plain. Walter Campbell asked the satirists to come out and help him to rend the tree, and they came. He placed half the satirists on one side of the tree, and the other half on the other side. He drove a wedge into the bole of the tree, and rent the bole along the line of the stem. Then he asked the men to place their hands in the rent, and to pull against one another, while he drove in the wedge. The men placed their hands as directed. Walter Campbell struck the wedge not in, but out, however, and the two sides of the rent tree sprang together like the sides of a steel trap, holding the hands of the satirists as securely as if in a strong vice. Walter Campbell, the son of the ‘deor,’ lost control of his pent-up anger, and he fell upon the satirists with great fury, and scourged them and maimed them, killing some and wounding others fatally.

The upshot was that Walter Campbell had to flee for his own life as he had broken the unspoken law of hospitality and where he eventually ended up in the Mearns of Kincardine. Carmichael continues with his supposition that, ‘Walter Campbell found people of the names of Burness, singularly like his own familiar cognomen of Burn-house at home in Muckairn; and as a slight disguise, he called himself by this designation of Burnhouse, dropping his clan name of Campbell. It was an easy transition from Walter Burnhouse to Walter Burness, Brunus, Burnes, Burns.’

A well-known fact is that Robert Burns’s descendants were called the Burness family from Kincardineshire, where they were tenant farmers. His father William moved to Ayrshire – where the prospects seemed better – in 1750 where Robert was born on 25 January 1759. One of Robert Burns’s great-great-grandfather’s was called Walter Burness who was probably born around 1625 and who died in 1670 in Bogjorgan, Glenbervie, Kincardineshire. So can this Walter be indentified with the one who escaped the West Highlands by the skin of his teeth? It is probably wishful thinking on Carmichael’s part for, along with a derivation that hardly seems to be water-tight, his romantic attachment to making a Scottish poetic icon be attached to a less than salubrious character seems a bit all too contrived and the evidence which he forwards does not make for a convincing argument to prove his point beyond any reasonable doubt. In other words, there is too much special pleading but it does make for an interesting story to say that Robert Burns was descended from a mass-murderer.

References:

Carmichael, Alexander, ‘The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt', Evergreen, vol. I (Spring, 1895), pp. 110–15

Carmichael, Alexander, ‘Traditions of the Land of Lorne and the Highland Ancestry of Robert Burns’, The Celtic Review, vol. VIII (1912), pp. 314–33

CW126, fol. 187v

Image: Robert Burns (1759–1796), Scotland’s National Bard.