Great read. Thanks! Happy to do a PhD as suggested.
Would just like to add to the Crieff Kincardine and cairnie - over by Auchterarder there is a Kincardine Glen, very enclosed with the Water of Ruthven running through its length, and Kincardine Castle (rebuilt to the east of the original and situated atop the glen). There is also the cairnie brae (A9 where lorries get stuck of snowing), on the way to Perth.
I do really think you are on to something, and the provincial spread is more grist to the mill.
I did wonder about translation rather than creation with a loan-word, and whether this would classify it as Pictish or Gaelic. But my brain was hurting, so let it go. A fresh attempt: such as Aberdeen is unique, so Pictish through gaelicisation; Kincardine is adapted to a Gaelic model, so Gaelic based on Pictish. The fact that there are six (noted!) suggests transparency in the process at least. Comparable though would be the singular case of Kinfail from Penfail near the west end of the Antonine Wall (coincidence that it's another wall name?).
BTW I was wrong on 'Galloway dyke', the type I was thinking of is seemingly a 'hedgerow dyke'.
It all sounds sound to me, Fiona. Yet another lifelong puzzle unravelling - thanks as ever! A wee(ish) quibble. Kincardine is not a "Pictish name", but like the Pit-names a Gaelic name with a loan-word from Pictish as an element. What (inter alia) I find interesting is the occurrence of more than one instance of the same toponym, which surely indicates a specialised meaning more than the sum of the parts - I mean, seven Kincardines did you say.... I've never been able to get my head around what could be so special about the head of a thicket or even enclosed area. What does it even mean? Well, the head of a hunting forest (cf English deer forest, Gaelic frìth, by the way) it's easier to conceive. The (main) entrance? Or as I think you mentioned, perhaps the entrance complete with royal accommodation (hall? pavilion spot?). And a further thought, catching passing thoughts before they, well, pass: maybe the various potential semantic roots come together in contributing to reference to the park hedge or wall itself, with maybe a vegetation top to a fail dyke, or even a Galloway dyke (if I'm recalling what that is correctly), and/or resembling a fortification. Might fit with ceann 'end (of)' well, though I'm not overly sold on that, as there would presumably be two ends close to one another. Of interest too though is the circle of carden-names you point to, if the park wall/hedge is the specific reference. Thoughts on Urquharts (one of which I'm in) and Pluscarden will be needed to test this theory! And of course as frequently happens, the word for an enclosing feature could semantically shift to the enclosed space itself. (Which in itself might help said theory - where did the word for a forest otherwise come from?).
Hi Peadar, thanks very much indeed for these thoughts. And point taken on Kincardine being a Gaelic name with a Pictish loan-word - although could it not also be a Gaelicisation of a pre-existing Pictish *Pencarden? Either way, I'll update the post to note that Kin/ceann is Gaelic not Pictish. I do think the Kincardines need looking at as a discrete category. As I mentioned to Murray below they are quite broadly dispersed, almost as if there was one per ?province. There are seven in all, but Simon Taylor felt that Kincardine on the Forth in Fife was not a 'carden' name: https://fife-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/placename/?id=888. Four of the remaining six became parishes and one became a burgh and the county town of Kincardineshire, which suggests they had some status beyond just being the topographical 'end of the forest/enclosure'. Like you, I think they were perhaps the location of the ?royal hunting lodge/estate/pavilion. I'm also mulling the idea that the pre-monasterial Kinrymont had the same meaning and function. What was it about the 'muir' in the eighth century that made it the 'king's muir'? Was it a reserved hunting ground, encompassing the Boar's Raik? If so, that would go against current thinking - which is almost entirely derived from John Gilbert's 1979 book Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland - that there was no royal forest in Scotland before the twelfth century (the subtext being that Pictland was not sufficiently sophisticated). If there were reserved hunting grounds, there may well have been hedges or walls (or, as Bernard proposed below, palisade fences) to restrict access. I'm struggling a bit with Urquhart, though, as the Urquhart in Moray doesn't seem to be in promising hunting territory. Any proximity-inspired thoughts on Urquharts would be gratefully received!
I’d be interested in anything around the time periods llinked with, let’s call it middle class, approaches to life, and whether leisure formed any part of the proximity of pockets of cardens where there was space for just having a private / exclusive place for whatever reason. There is always an impetus for magnates, be they local, regional, or greater, to have private spaces, sometimes even for the females of the family.
Less rambly, i can see a very easy morph path from card to gart, so should they not, possibly be considered as one word, rather than two.
Also, is there any more clearly defined idea of how big the overarching ‘card’ was and when the derivatives start to emerge, where possibly the uptake of card becomes an adopted aspirant to boost standing, rather than a definite wide locality belonging to a magnate with absolute power over a wide space.
Thanks Chas, please feel free to ramble as much as you like :) If you're referring to the time period when the term 'carden' is presumed to have been used as an active place-name element, then that is the period in which the Pictish language is presumed to have been dominant, i.e. 400-900 AD (at the latest). That is a period for which there are virtually no documentary sources and thus virtually no insight into how Pictish society was organised. The only insight into a non-royal landed class that I can think of off the top of my head is in Adomnán's Life of Columba (written c.700), where Columba converts an old Pictish man, Emchath, "with his whole household", to Christianity. Come to think of it, though, this event occurs at a place called Airchartdan, i.e. Urquhart on Loch Ness, and Adomnán describes it as an "ager" which is usually translated as "estate". Airchartdan is our earliest written reference to a 'carden' place-name. And the name of Emchath's estate of Airchartdan means "place at the side of a carden". Hmmm. I think you've raised a very interesting point! I will have to go away and think about it.
Looking back from the 17th century KIncardine contained at its furthest reaches the hunting Forest of Freewater. However, it also contained some of the best native pinewoods in the north - which were of interest to the Norse as Barbara Crawford pointed out - and native oakwoods closer to the firth. And the Carron and the Kyle of Sutherland would have been full of salmon - whatever they were called in earlier times.
Thanks very much Malcolm for this - and I see that, according to Watson, Freevater as a name dates (perhaps) back to the turn of the 14th century, which is really useful to know.
Thank you for this intriguing and thought-provoking piece. Frequent commentators on Pictish carvings see the hunting scenes as expressions of interest in hunting amongst the Pictish powerful folk. I wonder that hunting was more than just a pass-time or an entertainment. I thought Val McDermid’s depiction of the hunts held by MacBeth’s cousin, Gille Coemgáin, mormaer of Moray (at least in her book)were credible; in her world hunting seems more integrated in the exercise of power, in the dialogue of rivalry and of patronage and of servitude than just the provision of pleasure. If that’s anywhere near reality, then a failed hunt could well imperil those same power relationships. In those circumstances, I could imagine the efficient magnate could see enclosure (and a resulting better chance of successful kills and contented subordinates) as a thing worth investing in. Perhaps in the evolution of the meaning of ‘carden’ we can also see the process by which the empowered sought to cement their supremacy by the better management of chance?
Many thanks Rod for these thoughts. I didn't know Val McDermid had written a Macbeth novel as well - I haven't even got round to reading Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter yet. I've no doubt that elite Pictish hunting would have had much more social significance than just an entertaining pastime. But I wouldn't like to speculate about how it might have functioned in Pictland when I'm barely aware of how it functioned in EM societies we do know about. Jane Geddes has been recommending Eric Goldberg's book In the Manner of the Franks: Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medieval Europe to me, and I should probably read it before having any more thoughts!
As always excellent, thought provoking and very useful. Inevitably I started thinking about Stirling, here we have a David I Royal wood (called a nemus on the burgh seal) then a park founded by William the lion. We have Gart names both sides of the Forth and a Kincardine to the north, 'head of the wood' (Gaelic and Pictish....Peter McNiven's excellent phd), next to a lovely motte. Is this perhaps the entry to to the woods from the Alba end? Kincardine parish runs to the Forth and Dunblane with its 9th/10th century cross is up the road. Can't find any Elrick placenames as yet but we certainly have one on the ground in the park!
Many thanks Murray - your Stirling Kincardine is really interesting. I didn't have space for this in the blog, but it's notable that the six Kincardines in Scotland are very spaced out, and four of them (including yours) became parishes and one became a burgh and county town. That's quite a high conversion rate for a name that nominally just means 'end of the wood'. My very tentative thought is that Kincardine places may not just have had a topographical meaning, but may also have been high-status 'places' - estates with a royal hunting lodge, perhaps??? But that is probably a speculation too far!
I raised this with Andrew directly a few years ago and I think its been widely missed, but Julius Pokorny (Zeitschriftenschau, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 16, 1927, 467-68, at p. 468) argued that Middle Welsh cardden ‘enclosure, fort, thicket’ derives from a diminutive of Latin carduus ‘thistle’. It could have been used to mean something like 'palisade' -- its difficult to say -- but if Pokorny was right, it is not a derivationally Celtic word.
Thanks Bernard, I did wonder if you'd have some thoughts on the Celtic-ness or otherwise of the word. In a way, the topography seems a more helpful guide to the meaning than the etymology, although it would be nice to be more certain about what's underneath both 'carden' and 'cardden' and whether or not they really are cognates.
I think you need to reconcile all the semantic aspects. If Pokorny was right, there must have been a British Latin word *cardinus that meant 'thorny, barbed' and I suggested to Andrew that it may have been used to indicate a site protected by defences like palisades or other spiked or thorny barriers.
Oh I see, thank you - I thought you were suggesting 'thistly place', which would fit with Alan James's interpretation of somewhere that's difficult to get through. The distribution in Scotland, and the compound names (e.g. Kincardine, Cardoness, Cardross), suggest that whatever 'carden' was, it covered quite a wide area. I'm not sure if you would have 'end of the palisaded enclosure' as a frequently-occurring toponym unless the enclosures in question were very big. I think Rhynie might be the largest palisaded enclosure that we know of in Pictland, and it wouldn't have needed different toponyms for different parts of it. Plus it is a lowland site, whereas the 'cardens' are either in or on the edge of upland territory, and they don't correlate with known hillforts or defensive enclosures.
The term wouldn't have to indicate an enclosure. You are generally better at sticking to parsimonious explanations in linguistics and something like a defensive dyke would do -- the structure would just need to be barbed for the etymology to hold.
Thanks again Bernard, that is interesting and something to think about. As I've mentioned to Peadar above, current thinking is that there was no enclosed/reserved forest in Pictland prior to the twelfth century, but I think that is based on snobbery as to the sophistication or otherwise of the Pictish aristocracy.
Well you’ve certainly taken that and run with it! 😃 Well done.
Only additional comment I’d make is not to worry too much about the Welsh interpretation of a cardden being an enclosed space. As words move through time and space it is not uncommon for them to accrue new meaning and discard old ones. Let’s leave that with the Welsh
Thanks Alastair, and thanks for setting me off down a very interesting path! It's true that carden may have taken on a different meaning in Pictish - but there's also a really interesting example at Cardoness in Kirkcudbrightshire, above which is Ardwall Deer Park and a hill with the excellent name of Knocktinkle, after G. timchoill, the people who would drive deer off the hills and down into an area where they could be shot. So maybe it didn't just apply in Pictland. But either way, I'm pretty certain it didn't mean 'fort'.
Phenomenally interesting post, especially as someone currently writing a chapter involving hunting evidence around the Forth and Tay! Bede mentions Oswiu of Northumbria coming back from a royal hunt, which first piqued my interest. The archaeological evidence shows higher percentages of red deer remains (in comparison to other food mammals) in Pictish sites like Burghead or Mither Tap than comparable early medieval sites around the Forth, outside of Edinburgh's Castle Rock, which has a remarkably high percentage of red deer.
Thanks Trevor, interesting! That's Eduard Masson-Maclean's paper? I'd forgotten about that one, and it does indeed indicate a small amount of deer consumption at Burghead and Mither Tap. But none for Craig Rock, which vaguely fits with the (very minimal!) place-name evidence for boar rather than deer being hunted around St Andrews. Are you looking at place-name and sculptural evidence too, or just faunal remains?
Yes, that's the one! The section in the Driscoll/Yeoman Edinburgh Castle excavation volume, though older, is also good - helps frame how much deer bone is a surprising amount of deer bone. I've been looking at sculptural and have been on the edge of place-name studies, and I found this just fascinating. It's interesting to me that we've got Forth evidence of hunting in terms of bone on the southern shores and sculpture on the northern, like the beautiful Scoonie and Largo stones, but nothing on Craig Rock! Clatchard Craig had some deer...
As usual I am fascinated by all of this, and (also as usual) I have nothing helpful to add, other than that it reminded me of a wonderful woman I used to know whose name was Maureen Carden... but sadly she died a few years ago so I can't ask her if she knows where her surname came from (she probably did - she was an avid quizzer!) However, I'm fairly sure she lived her whole life in Rochdale, so if her name had the same root then it travelled quite a bit!
Thanks Jocelyn! Well maybe it wouldn't have needed to travel *too* far, since Brittonic is also the ancestor of Welsh - even if it might have had a different meaning in Welsh than in Pictish.
Great read. Thanks! Happy to do a PhD as suggested.
Would just like to add to the Crieff Kincardine and cairnie - over by Auchterarder there is a Kincardine Glen, very enclosed with the Water of Ruthven running through its length, and Kincardine Castle (rebuilt to the east of the original and situated atop the glen). There is also the cairnie brae (A9 where lorries get stuck of snowing), on the way to Perth.
Many thanks Deely, and glad you enjoyed it! I wasn't able to discuss all of the Kincardines and Cairnies etc. in the blog, but I do have the Auchterarder Kincardine and Cairnie Brae on my map of 'carden' places: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1mZ9jhpq0CcIGrgBCMqZRiQqKCpgXblw&ll=56.33113510452808%2C-3.655868403411544&z=11 These were places that W.F.H. Nicolaisen identified as genuine 'carden' names in 1976, so they definitely count.
If snowing, apologies
The Cairnie Brae sits above Forteviot and Dupplin.
I do really think you are on to something, and the provincial spread is more grist to the mill.
I did wonder about translation rather than creation with a loan-word, and whether this would classify it as Pictish or Gaelic. But my brain was hurting, so let it go. A fresh attempt: such as Aberdeen is unique, so Pictish through gaelicisation; Kincardine is adapted to a Gaelic model, so Gaelic based on Pictish. The fact that there are six (noted!) suggests transparency in the process at least. Comparable though would be the singular case of Kinfail from Penfail near the west end of the Antonine Wall (coincidence that it's another wall name?).
BTW I was wrong on 'Galloway dyke', the type I was thinking of is seemingly a 'hedgerow dyke'.
St Andrews - absolutely.
It all sounds sound to me, Fiona. Yet another lifelong puzzle unravelling - thanks as ever! A wee(ish) quibble. Kincardine is not a "Pictish name", but like the Pit-names a Gaelic name with a loan-word from Pictish as an element. What (inter alia) I find interesting is the occurrence of more than one instance of the same toponym, which surely indicates a specialised meaning more than the sum of the parts - I mean, seven Kincardines did you say.... I've never been able to get my head around what could be so special about the head of a thicket or even enclosed area. What does it even mean? Well, the head of a hunting forest (cf English deer forest, Gaelic frìth, by the way) it's easier to conceive. The (main) entrance? Or as I think you mentioned, perhaps the entrance complete with royal accommodation (hall? pavilion spot?). And a further thought, catching passing thoughts before they, well, pass: maybe the various potential semantic roots come together in contributing to reference to the park hedge or wall itself, with maybe a vegetation top to a fail dyke, or even a Galloway dyke (if I'm recalling what that is correctly), and/or resembling a fortification. Might fit with ceann 'end (of)' well, though I'm not overly sold on that, as there would presumably be two ends close to one another. Of interest too though is the circle of carden-names you point to, if the park wall/hedge is the specific reference. Thoughts on Urquharts (one of which I'm in) and Pluscarden will be needed to test this theory! And of course as frequently happens, the word for an enclosing feature could semantically shift to the enclosed space itself. (Which in itself might help said theory - where did the word for a forest otherwise come from?).
Hi Peadar, thanks very much indeed for these thoughts. And point taken on Kincardine being a Gaelic name with a Pictish loan-word - although could it not also be a Gaelicisation of a pre-existing Pictish *Pencarden? Either way, I'll update the post to note that Kin/ceann is Gaelic not Pictish. I do think the Kincardines need looking at as a discrete category. As I mentioned to Murray below they are quite broadly dispersed, almost as if there was one per ?province. There are seven in all, but Simon Taylor felt that Kincardine on the Forth in Fife was not a 'carden' name: https://fife-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/placename/?id=888. Four of the remaining six became parishes and one became a burgh and the county town of Kincardineshire, which suggests they had some status beyond just being the topographical 'end of the forest/enclosure'. Like you, I think they were perhaps the location of the ?royal hunting lodge/estate/pavilion. I'm also mulling the idea that the pre-monasterial Kinrymont had the same meaning and function. What was it about the 'muir' in the eighth century that made it the 'king's muir'? Was it a reserved hunting ground, encompassing the Boar's Raik? If so, that would go against current thinking - which is almost entirely derived from John Gilbert's 1979 book Hunting and Hunting Reserves in Medieval Scotland - that there was no royal forest in Scotland before the twelfth century (the subtext being that Pictland was not sufficiently sophisticated). If there were reserved hunting grounds, there may well have been hedges or walls (or, as Bernard proposed below, palisade fences) to restrict access. I'm struggling a bit with Urquhart, though, as the Urquhart in Moray doesn't seem to be in promising hunting territory. Any proximity-inspired thoughts on Urquharts would be gratefully received!
Permission to ramble a bit 😃
I’d be interested in anything around the time periods llinked with, let’s call it middle class, approaches to life, and whether leisure formed any part of the proximity of pockets of cardens where there was space for just having a private / exclusive place for whatever reason. There is always an impetus for magnates, be they local, regional, or greater, to have private spaces, sometimes even for the females of the family.
Less rambly, i can see a very easy morph path from card to gart, so should they not, possibly be considered as one word, rather than two.
Also, is there any more clearly defined idea of how big the overarching ‘card’ was and when the derivatives start to emerge, where possibly the uptake of card becomes an adopted aspirant to boost standing, rather than a definite wide locality belonging to a magnate with absolute power over a wide space.
Thanks Chas, please feel free to ramble as much as you like :) If you're referring to the time period when the term 'carden' is presumed to have been used as an active place-name element, then that is the period in which the Pictish language is presumed to have been dominant, i.e. 400-900 AD (at the latest). That is a period for which there are virtually no documentary sources and thus virtually no insight into how Pictish society was organised. The only insight into a non-royal landed class that I can think of off the top of my head is in Adomnán's Life of Columba (written c.700), where Columba converts an old Pictish man, Emchath, "with his whole household", to Christianity. Come to think of it, though, this event occurs at a place called Airchartdan, i.e. Urquhart on Loch Ness, and Adomnán describes it as an "ager" which is usually translated as "estate". Airchartdan is our earliest written reference to a 'carden' place-name. And the name of Emchath's estate of Airchartdan means "place at the side of a carden". Hmmm. I think you've raised a very interesting point! I will have to go away and think about it.
Looking back from the 17th century KIncardine contained at its furthest reaches the hunting Forest of Freewater. However, it also contained some of the best native pinewoods in the north - which were of interest to the Norse as Barbara Crawford pointed out - and native oakwoods closer to the firth. And the Carron and the Kyle of Sutherland would have been full of salmon - whatever they were called in earlier times.
Thanks very much Malcolm for this - and I see that, according to Watson, Freevater as a name dates (perhaps) back to the turn of the 14th century, which is really useful to know.
Thank you for this intriguing and thought-provoking piece. Frequent commentators on Pictish carvings see the hunting scenes as expressions of interest in hunting amongst the Pictish powerful folk. I wonder that hunting was more than just a pass-time or an entertainment. I thought Val McDermid’s depiction of the hunts held by MacBeth’s cousin, Gille Coemgáin, mormaer of Moray (at least in her book)were credible; in her world hunting seems more integrated in the exercise of power, in the dialogue of rivalry and of patronage and of servitude than just the provision of pleasure. If that’s anywhere near reality, then a failed hunt could well imperil those same power relationships. In those circumstances, I could imagine the efficient magnate could see enclosure (and a resulting better chance of successful kills and contented subordinates) as a thing worth investing in. Perhaps in the evolution of the meaning of ‘carden’ we can also see the process by which the empowered sought to cement their supremacy by the better management of chance?
Many thanks Rod for these thoughts. I didn't know Val McDermid had written a Macbeth novel as well - I haven't even got round to reading Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter yet. I've no doubt that elite Pictish hunting would have had much more social significance than just an entertaining pastime. But I wouldn't like to speculate about how it might have functioned in Pictland when I'm barely aware of how it functioned in EM societies we do know about. Jane Geddes has been recommending Eric Goldberg's book In the Manner of the Franks: Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medieval Europe to me, and I should probably read it before having any more thoughts!
As always excellent, thought provoking and very useful. Inevitably I started thinking about Stirling, here we have a David I Royal wood (called a nemus on the burgh seal) then a park founded by William the lion. We have Gart names both sides of the Forth and a Kincardine to the north, 'head of the wood' (Gaelic and Pictish....Peter McNiven's excellent phd), next to a lovely motte. Is this perhaps the entry to to the woods from the Alba end? Kincardine parish runs to the Forth and Dunblane with its 9th/10th century cross is up the road. Can't find any Elrick placenames as yet but we certainly have one on the ground in the park!
Bravo!
I think it’s a good argument. It’s certainly got me thinking about the motte again.
Many thanks Murray - your Stirling Kincardine is really interesting. I didn't have space for this in the blog, but it's notable that the six Kincardines in Scotland are very spaced out, and four of them (including yours) became parishes and one became a burgh and county town. That's quite a high conversion rate for a name that nominally just means 'end of the wood'. My very tentative thought is that Kincardine places may not just have had a topographical meaning, but may also have been high-status 'places' - estates with a royal hunting lodge, perhaps??? But that is probably a speculation too far!
I raised this with Andrew directly a few years ago and I think its been widely missed, but Julius Pokorny (Zeitschriftenschau, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 16, 1927, 467-68, at p. 468) argued that Middle Welsh cardden ‘enclosure, fort, thicket’ derives from a diminutive of Latin carduus ‘thistle’. It could have been used to mean something like 'palisade' -- its difficult to say -- but if Pokorny was right, it is not a derivationally Celtic word.
Thanks Bernard, I did wonder if you'd have some thoughts on the Celtic-ness or otherwise of the word. In a way, the topography seems a more helpful guide to the meaning than the etymology, although it would be nice to be more certain about what's underneath both 'carden' and 'cardden' and whether or not they really are cognates.
I think you need to reconcile all the semantic aspects. If Pokorny was right, there must have been a British Latin word *cardinus that meant 'thorny, barbed' and I suggested to Andrew that it may have been used to indicate a site protected by defences like palisades or other spiked or thorny barriers.
Oh I see, thank you - I thought you were suggesting 'thistly place', which would fit with Alan James's interpretation of somewhere that's difficult to get through. The distribution in Scotland, and the compound names (e.g. Kincardine, Cardoness, Cardross), suggest that whatever 'carden' was, it covered quite a wide area. I'm not sure if you would have 'end of the palisaded enclosure' as a frequently-occurring toponym unless the enclosures in question were very big. I think Rhynie might be the largest palisaded enclosure that we know of in Pictland, and it wouldn't have needed different toponyms for different parts of it. Plus it is a lowland site, whereas the 'cardens' are either in or on the edge of upland territory, and they don't correlate with known hillforts or defensive enclosures.
The term wouldn't have to indicate an enclosure. You are generally better at sticking to parsimonious explanations in linguistics and something like a defensive dyke would do -- the structure would just need to be barbed for the etymology to hold.
Thanks again Bernard, that is interesting and something to think about. As I've mentioned to Peadar above, current thinking is that there was no enclosed/reserved forest in Pictland prior to the twelfth century, but I think that is based on snobbery as to the sophistication or otherwise of the Pictish aristocracy.
Well you’ve certainly taken that and run with it! 😃 Well done.
Only additional comment I’d make is not to worry too much about the Welsh interpretation of a cardden being an enclosed space. As words move through time and space it is not uncommon for them to accrue new meaning and discard old ones. Let’s leave that with the Welsh
Thanks Alastair, and thanks for setting me off down a very interesting path! It's true that carden may have taken on a different meaning in Pictish - but there's also a really interesting example at Cardoness in Kirkcudbrightshire, above which is Ardwall Deer Park and a hill with the excellent name of Knocktinkle, after G. timchoill, the people who would drive deer off the hills and down into an area where they could be shot. So maybe it didn't just apply in Pictland. But either way, I'm pretty certain it didn't mean 'fort'.
Phenomenally interesting post, especially as someone currently writing a chapter involving hunting evidence around the Forth and Tay! Bede mentions Oswiu of Northumbria coming back from a royal hunt, which first piqued my interest. The archaeological evidence shows higher percentages of red deer remains (in comparison to other food mammals) in Pictish sites like Burghead or Mither Tap than comparable early medieval sites around the Forth, outside of Edinburgh's Castle Rock, which has a remarkably high percentage of red deer.
Thanks Trevor, interesting! That's Eduard Masson-Maclean's paper? I'd forgotten about that one, and it does indeed indicate a small amount of deer consumption at Burghead and Mither Tap. But none for Craig Rock, which vaguely fits with the (very minimal!) place-name evidence for boar rather than deer being hunted around St Andrews. Are you looking at place-name and sculptural evidence too, or just faunal remains?
Yes, that's the one! The section in the Driscoll/Yeoman Edinburgh Castle excavation volume, though older, is also good - helps frame how much deer bone is a surprising amount of deer bone. I've been looking at sculptural and have been on the edge of place-name studies, and I found this just fascinating. It's interesting to me that we've got Forth evidence of hunting in terms of bone on the southern shores and sculpture on the northern, like the beautiful Scoonie and Largo stones, but nothing on Craig Rock! Clatchard Craig had some deer...
As usual I am fascinated by all of this, and (also as usual) I have nothing helpful to add, other than that it reminded me of a wonderful woman I used to know whose name was Maureen Carden... but sadly she died a few years ago so I can't ask her if she knows where her surname came from (she probably did - she was an avid quizzer!) However, I'm fairly sure she lived her whole life in Rochdale, so if her name had the same root then it travelled quite a bit!
Thanks Jocelyn! Well maybe it wouldn't have needed to travel *too* far, since Brittonic is also the ancestor of Welsh - even if it might have had a different meaning in Welsh than in Pictish.