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PICTISH PLACE-NAMES REVISITED Simon Taylor This paper aims to do two things. The first is to attempt to define what a Pictish place-name is, and to discuss some of the problems of distinguishing between place-names coined by speakers of Pictish and place-names coined by speakers of other Celtic languages in northern Britain. The second is to re-examine the distribution of place-names in northern Britain which contain certain elements defined as P-Celtic.1 I will start by stating my assumptions: whether or not these assump- tions will be challenged by the evidence presented in the chapter itself, it is for the reader to judge. The first assumption is that a language called Pictish existed. I certainly believe, with Watson (1926), Jackson (1955), Nicolaisen (1976), Koch (1983) and Forsyth (1997), that the peoples north of the Forth spoke a P-Celtic language or languages before they spoke Q-Celtic. It was Jackson who coined the term ‘Pritenic’ to apply to this language before about 500 AD, as opposed to Brittonic, the name for the closely related P-Celtic language spoken further south (1955, 160). According to this model Pictish develops from Pritenic, British from Brittonic. Jackson, in his important chapter “The Pictish Language” in The Problem of the Picts, uses ‘British’ “only in the strict sense of the language of the people living in what became the prov- ince of Roman Britain, south of the Antonine Wall” (1955, 130). Both Jackson and Koch would argue that Pritenic and Brittonic were diverg- ing already during the Roman period (Koch 1983, 214). Before moving on to the evidence provided by place-names, I will say a little more about the key publications which inform these discus- sions, the most influential of which is Jackson’s above-mentioned and widely-known “Pictish Language” chapter (1955). In 1983 John Koch published an article which included an important section on Pictish, but this is far less well known, partly because of its appearance in an 1 I am indebted to Dauvit Broun, Thomas Clancy, Katherine Forsyth, Mark Hall, Alan James, Gilbert Márkus, Guto Rhys, John Wilkinson and Alex Woolf for com- ments and corrections on an earlier draft of this paper. All mistakes and shortcomings are, needless to say, my own. 68 simon taylor academic journal (Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies), partly because of its rather daunting title, “The Loss of Final Syllables and Loss of Declension in Brittonic”. In 1997 Katherine Forsyth, who had been John Koch’s postgraduate student, published Language in Pictland, in which, while accepting the basic notion of an early divergence between Brittonic and Pritenic, she stressed that “we must keep in mind that they are united by far more than divides them” (1997, 27). It can be added here that when we come to look at the place-name evidence, this statement is strongly reinforced. The main focus of Forsyth’s argu- ment, however, was not the divergence or otherwise of Pictish from other P-Celtic languages but rather the question of whether there was any survival into Pictish times of a non-Indo-European language in Northern Britain. She argues against such survival, and for the thor- ough-going “Celticity” of the Picts. This particular debate has been running since the nineteenth century, and is still alive in the twenty- first, since Graham Isaac has revived the whole question of the possible survival into Early Historic times of a non-Indo-European language in northern Britain, alongside a P-Celtic language (Isaac 2005). This paper will avoid this latter debate entirely, concentrating only on the place-name evidence which provides the strongest indication of the existence in northern Britain of a P-Celtic language closely related to Brittonic or British.2 The first problem which is encountered in any such discussion concerns the geographical boundary between Pictish and British. This is not a problem in those areas which can be assigned in the early medieval period relatively uncontroversially to one or other kingship, such as the kingship of the Picts: e.g. Fife, Kinross, Aberdeen and eastern Inverness-shire; or to the kingship of Strathclyde, such as Lanarkshire. However, when we come to the small county of Clackmannanshire, the definitions of Pictish or British become far less straightforward. It was an area which, when it first enters the historical 2 In this chapter I will use ‘British’ in much the same way as that defined by Jackson above, i.e. to refer to the P-Celtic language spoken within what became Roman Britain south of the Antonine Wall. However, I will also use it as a general term to apply to the P-Celtic languages spoken in this area after the end of the Roman Empire, a language referred to variously as Brittonic and Brythonic (see Koch 2006, under ‘Brythonic’). It thus includes Welsh and the language of the British kingdoms of the north, such as the kingdom of Al Clud (Dumbarton), which stretched well to the north of the Wall, and its successor, the kingdom of Strathclyde. In this northern context it replaces the frequently used but problematic term ‘Cumbric’, described as “more correctly a geo- graphic rather than a linguistic term” (Koch 2006, under ‘Cumbric’)..

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