| Craigellachie |
Apr 23rd, 2005 02:23 PM |
Near Strathdon in north east Scotland there's a village called Lost. Recently the local council came very close to changing its name because they spent so much money replacing the name signs that were stolen by souvenir hunters. In Argyll we also have vllages called New York and Moscow and a farm called Abyssinia. There's Halfway which not surprisingly is in the middle of nowhere between Glasgow and Kilmarnock. In the Trossachs (quite a name in itself) there's a Loch Drunkie. Drunkie House, the local stately home, was renamed Invertrossachs to avoid offending Queen Victoria when she visited. And how could we forget three beautiful and completely different islands in the Inner Hebrides - Rum, Eigg and Muck. (Some books still spell the first of these as Rhum, purely for puitanical reasons; I'm reliably informed there is no word in the Gaelic language with Rh as a combination of letters.) There are dozens of Scottish mountains with Gaelic names which some guide books prefer not to translate. Best known is the Devil's Point in the Carngorm mountains whose gaelic name actualy translates as another five letter word starting with P. Several other mountain names compare the shape of the mountain to anatomical features of ladies, gentlemen and even horses. It's widely believed that these came about when the first official maps were being drawn. The English speaking map makers asked the locals for the names of all the prominent features, the locals had their bit of fun giving them all suggestive names, and the map makers in all innocence believed them.
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