Oral Tradition and Place-Names
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I. Introduction
The area covered by the survey, lying as it does between Finlarig and Fearnan, is one which at the time supported a substantial Gaelic-speaking population. There is evidence of a strong Gaelic tradtion in the North Loch Tay-side settlements, at least up to 1950, although it was possible to encounter native speakers of Gaelic until at least a decade later. It was a matter of some debate whether these last representatives of an old culture were themselves tradition-bearers in the real sense of the word, since by 1960, the dilution of culture, which included oral narrative, traditional songs and associated lore was fairly pronounced. Much of this was due to the rapid Anglicisation of social life in the immediate post-WWII period, when it became unfashionable for a younger generation to speak the Gaelic of their parencts, some of whom used it as a 'secret' language in order to keep thinks from their children! In this sense, Tayside was not uncommon, since similar conditions vis-a-vis spoken Gaelicwere evident in various parts of the Gaelic-speaking area, especially on the mainland. As a result of this ostensible paucity of Gaelic oral tradition, the are was somewhat neglected when this subject began to be investigated by such bodies as the School of Scottish Studies of Edinburgh University after its founding in 1951. It was considered, rightly or wrongly, that the extensive resources of material, from all apsects of lore, which were available from existing Gaelic-speaking popultaions in the west, and in the islands, should be the prime target for collection and investigation.This did not mean, of course, that the area was ignored in terms of it's linguistic evidence, and the Gaelic Linguistic Survey was active in the area in the 1950s. A number of informants contributed to the extensive collections of Gaelic linguistics material, including people from Killin, Morenish and Carie. These are included in the tape archive of the survey, and date from 1954 on.
II. Place Names
Documentary Evidence
The study area is reasonably well represented by docutments which mention local place-names. One is quite fortunate to find forms of settlement names pre-1250 for this kind of Highland zone, since much of the contemporary evidence relates to the Central Belt, Lothian and the eastern seaboard. The earliest documentary reference to Glen Dochart, for example, is c.1200. The Black Book of Taymouth, dating from 1432 provides us with only a few early spellings. and it is only when we examine the Ponts maps of 1583-1596 that we find more extensive coverage, even so this supplies only a score of names. The rental of 1718 is the first significant document to list most of the farms in our area, and the maps and surveys of the eighteenth century give us more or less complete coverage.Deviation-Settlement Names
Most of the farm - and settlement - names in the area are highly descriptive. Virtually all of these coined pre - 1800 are Gaelic, although there are several which contain elements that have been indentified as Pictish and Celtic. We are fortunate that the survey of Breadalbane carried out by W.J. Watson, and published in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness Vol. 34 (1928), provides a scholarly analysis of many of these settlement names, which involves the evidence of lacal Gaelic speaker as informants for available at the time of Watsoh's research in the 1920s and '30s, but is now virtually impossible to obtain.Watson's derivations of settlement names along the north shore of Loch Tay provide us with a range of largely conventional Gaelic generics, in most cases, to landscape terms, words connected with land management, natural resources, and a number of rental terms which are frequently found in Perthshire. Among these, the term marg
| Dr Ian Fraser University of Edinburgh [External Link] |
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