106 SCOTTISH FORESTS IN EARLY TIMES. 



for many centuries is borne witness to by the remote period of the 

 beginning of our Iron Age. 



The names of places often preserve the recollection of topo- 

 graphical features and historical events in a country or district, 

 long after these events and features have passed away. The 

 names of the greater natural features of a landscape, such as 

 islands, mountains, rivers and lochs, have a wonderful permanence 

 all over the world, and amongst widely scattered races of people, 

 who, seeing such things as they really are, seldom failed to attach 

 a distinctive name to each, by which they described the place or 

 scene. Thus a place-name tells a story, and as you may have 

 gathered from the references I have already made to such names 

 as Caledonia and Dunkeld, Scottish place-names are not silent as 

 to our woodlands and forests. I have a list of some names 

 derived from such sources, and dealing, as I am now, with the 

 earliest historic times, only names in the languages of the 

 earliest known inhabitants or the invaders of their country — 

 the Romans — are admissible at present. Such few names as the 

 Romans have left on the face of our maps are of no service in 

 this connection, as they scarcely touch on natural features, but 

 the Celtic peoples whom they endeavoured to crush have thickly 

 marked the country with good descriptive names. But a branch 

 of the Celtic tongue, Gaelic, is a spoken and current language 

 to-day, and in this fact lies a chronological difficulty which makes 

 the treatment of these place-names far from easy at present. 

 That is to say, the Gaelic name of a place may have been given 

 to that place only yesterday or it may have been given more than 

 1500 years ago; consequently each name has to be traced to its 

 origin to find the date or period at which the description conveyed 

 in the name was applicable to the place named. Dunkeld, for 

 instance, in another spelling, is Duincaillen, found as far back as 

 865, at anyrate ; and doubtless, other names in my list boast a 

 similar antiquity. But this is not the place nor time to demonstrate 

 this, and it must suffice to say that, at anyrate, five Gaelic words 

 ( coille,fiodh, fasach, frith and ros) conveying the general meaning 

 of a wood or forest occur as components frequently in our place- 

 names, and the Brythonic word coed, with a similar meaning, also 

 occurs ; another Gaelic word, dinat, means a wooded glen ; six 

 words in the same tongue (mhirine, bad, creathach or crionach, 



