HEN'S HOLE IN CHEVIOT 137 



Llew, son of Cynmarch, the Welsh King of Lothian, is a 

 real personage ; there is a curious relic of Welsh possession 

 in the name of Glen Fin, a Welsh boundary-glen, that of a 

 small ravine joining the Pease dean from the northern side, 

 and probably originally that of the larger valley. And as 

 Cornhill, immediately south of the Tweed, has a dedication 

 to St. Helena, it seems as if these three churches marked 

 Ed wain's acquisition of successive provinces ; his baptism at 

 the hands of Rum or Romeo, the son of Urien and nephew 

 of Llew, showing some sort of agreement with the Welsh 

 powers. I imagine Edwin's adoption of the tufa standard, 

 the feathers of the Welsh princes, is a further mark of this. 

 (Edwin was stopped . by the frontier at the Ettrick, outside 

 of Cumbria proper.) 



But St. Helena is so obviously the saint whose name 

 would be given to High Cheviot, that I wonder the name 

 had not occurred to me in connection with Hen's Hole. 



Hen is probably a Celtic genitive for saint ; but it is 

 apparently mixed up with the Celto-Italic sen, old, which 

 is so widely used as a term of respect ; the extreme case 

 perhaps being in Italian, where a little girl, if a gentleman's 

 daughter, is a signorina. It is probably a native Welsh 

 word, for, though Latin was and is freely borrowed in 

 Welsh, Sen is used in Gaelic, genitive, hen. 



It may be mentioned that by one of the caprices of 

 language, a word that often represents saint in Gaelic is 

 Og, a term of endearment, of which the principal meaning 

 seems to be young. It is used as a diminutive in the 

 western lowlands. 



Hell has kept its ground as the adjective in German, as 

 Bright has in English ; there is nothing analogous to bright 

 in the German dictionary. 



I rather think it was in the same letter, in which he 

 gave the Percy form of the Hen's Hole legend, that Dr 

 Hardy mentioned a sea cave near Cockburnspath, in which 

 there is an army asleep, who are to rise and save Britain 

 when on the point of being conquered. This is interesting, 

 as the Welsh form of the belief recurs on the Cumbrian 

 frontier at the Eildons. 



