15,000 Gaelic Place-Names Reveal Scotland's Forgotten Woodlands
Coilltean Caillte, a partnership project, has mapped over 15,000 Scottish place-names that hint at ancient woodland. Many names appear in areas that are now open ground, suggesting long-lost forests. By combining linguistic clues with ecological data, the project offers a deeper understanding of past landscapes and informs future land management. Explore the open-source map and discover the woodland heritage hidden in Gaelic names like coille, doire, and fiodh.
Place-names can help us to read the landscape, adding an important cultural and historical context and appreciation.
- delichon
If someday someone does this study for South Florida, they will wonder how a previously mountainous terrain became so flat. You can drive around and spot "Hills," "Heights,” “Ridge,” “Vista,” and “View” on pancake-flat sites. Hopefully there weren't ancient Scottish versions of real estate developers confounding this study.
- dvh
Speaking of forgotten woodlands, I've talked about this on HN two times already, might as well say it third time. Go on Google maps and look at the size of the Sherwood forest. I've never truly recovered from that experience.
- nephihaha
"Gaelic has been spoken at one time or another in the whole of Scotland, barring the north of Caithness..."
It was spoken in the north of Caithness into the 20th century in Dounreay parish, and previously some other areas just to the west of Thurso. (There is evidence of past Gaelic usage in Dunnet parish, and if "the Caithness Book" is to be believed, even in Stroma, the most northerly part of Caithness.)