Place Names in Kirkpatrick-Durham. 24'J 



the Ayr party seeing them rush there saw that a mistake had been 

 made. Captain Palmer and several others were wounded in the 

 encounter and had to stay in the Castle till their wounds were 

 healed. At this particular period the Tolbooth proper was in 

 a most ruinous condition, and it may have been on this account 

 that the prisoner was not confined there. It has always been 

 held that the present Council House occupies the site of the 

 former one, but it is just a little strange that the prison and Cross 

 .should be so near one another, while the Council Chambers and 

 Court-House were at the extreme end of the Burgh. There is a 

 case here for investigation, and I would not be the least surprised 

 to see it proved that the present Tolbooth is in quite a different 

 .situation from the former one. 



Place Names in Kirkpatrick-Dorand, Commonly Called 

 Kirkpatrick-Durham. By Rev. W. A. Stark, F.S.A., Scot. 



When we attempt to pierce' the darkness which shrouds the 

 hills of Galloway before the time which is called historic, we 

 seem to descry a people who lived here before the advent of any 

 Gaelic speakers, either Brythonic or Keltic. Those ancient 

 inhabitants are supposed to have spoken "a dialect of Iverian," 

 and they have left behind them in Galloway one word, namely, 

 the word Urr, or Orr, which is the name of the stream that forms 

 the we.stern boundary of the parish of Kirkpatrick-Dorand. The 

 same word Urr is said to be the Basque word for water. 

 Readers of S. R. Crockett's " Adventurer in Spain " may remem- 

 ber that he mentions hearing on the .slopes of the Pyrenees " the 

 bell of Ur Church," and adds "they say Ur is the ancient name 

 for waters — which, indeed, I can well believe, for this Ur is a 

 place of many of them." In old accounts of the Stewartry, and 

 also in the common speech of the people up to the present day, 

 the name of this stream is not Urr, but Orr, and is the same in 

 origin as the name of the river Ure in Yorkshire and of the Orr 

 Water in Fifeshire. That appears to be the only remaining trace 

 in the names of this parish of that ancient people. 



So far as the names of places are concerned, the Roman 

 occupation, which was only a brief one in Galloway, seems to 

 have left almost no vestige in the nomenclature of this parish : 



