CRAILING OR TRAVERLINN 143 



Traquair is Travercoir, the township of the choir, or 

 church. This had probably belonged to the old Cumbrian 

 church, which seems to have been almost annihilated at the 

 conquest of Cumbria. The bishopric of Glasgow was left 

 vacant, and Traquair appears as a royal residence just after 

 the time of David. Traverlinn would be the township of the 

 lake, or waterfall, or ravine. Trailtrow (in Dumfriesshire) is 

 Trevertrold, the township of St. Trolhena. Terregles, another 

 church-township, probably belonged to an extinct Celtic church. 



Traprain, in East Lothian, I should expect to find had 

 been Traverpren ; pren, being a Welsh word for wood, of 

 which press, occurring in the neighbourhood, is the Gaelic 

 form. The ridge of Traprain would naturally be wooded, 

 while the low grounds were marsh. 



Migen for marsh is a distinctively Welsh word, and there 

 is a Meigle moss between Galashiels and Clovenfords. 



Meigle, in Perthshire, where the wife of Arthur is said to 

 have been a prisoner, with a number of other Br-itons, is a 

 marshy locality ; and Hatfield, in Yorkshire, where Edwin 

 was defeated and killed, is called Meicen in the Welsh 

 accounts, and it is said to have been the official draining 

 of the great marsh there, on which the people of the country 

 lived by fishing and fowling, that made Yorkshire so 

 parliamentarian in the civil wars. 



It seems likely that the old language, as far east as the 

 Ettrick, having been a form of Welsh, and that apparently 

 discouraged as much as possible by the authorities, may 

 account for there being much fewer Gaelic place-names than 

 one would expect in Selkirkshire and Roxburghshire, where 

 a very large proportion of the words of the local dialect are 

 either Gaelic ones still in use in the Highlands, or belong 

 to poetical or literai-y Gaelic. The Scotch kings of the race 

 of Kenneth MacAlpin might not have been averse to intro- 

 ducing Gaelic, and the later Kings of Cumbria were a branch 

 of the Scotch royal family, elected by the Cumbrians in 908, 

 when the Roman line failed ; but after the conquest and 

 cession, at so late a date as 945, the Saxon of Northumbria 

 would more naturally make its way into the district. Duncan 

 I., who succeeded his grandfather, had the title of King 

 of Cumbria. 



