Frank Rennie, Professor of Sustainable Rural Development, Assistant Principal (Research, Enterprise, and Development), Lews Castle College, UHI
Some people have asked me occasionally, why does it matter that we should try to understand the naming of the landscape that we live amongst? I have usually replied in terms of historical perspectives, or identifying the personal attachments to a particular place, but that only partially explains it, because we sometimes call the same place by different names at different times in history, and even in different moods. Let me try a different analogy now.
Let’s think about the various names that we give to the people that we know – sometimes simultaneously referencing them with completely separate nomenclature.
For a start, there is the Scottish custom of a women adopting the surname of her husband when they get married. So, for example, Anna MacLeod becomes Anna MacDonald. She is still the same person, but we now reference her slightly differently. In more recent times, a woman may decide to retain her original surname, but that does not mean that she is not married. Frequently women, especially in the academic world, choose to retain their original surname because it helps, for example, to maintain a continuous record of their publications, rather than trying to build a professional reputation again from a blank start. They may also choose to use their married name in other contexts of their (non-academic) life. Sometimes they may decide to combine the names in a double-barrelled surname, and although that may create a little confusion with successive generations, there are ways around that too. There are changes that may occur with divorce. Does the person keep their married name or revert to their original family name? In a couple of cases that I am aware of, my friends have adopted a third option, to take up the family name of their mother, because they no longer feel comfortable with the earlier two options. They feel, in some way, that they have become a different person.
Nor does this renaming and reconfirming of identity only affect women. In many (most?) cases it is also culturally conditioned. In Iceland, the cultural naming convention is to adopt the suffix, …sson or …dottir to complete the first name of your parent. So Magnus, the son of Edvard, will be Magnus Edvardsson, but if Magnus has a son, also called Magnus, he will be named Magnus Magnusson. In a small, close society, this is intimately relatable, but in a larger, more metropolitan community, it may be harder to follow someone’s lineage, although their gender is immediately identifiable.
Tobair Aonghais Ghiolais (the well of Angus Gillies, the father of my wife’s father)
I have a good friend in Bhutan who has only one name, (although he has two fathers as two brothers married the same woman simultaneously). I have never asked if this single name is a first name or a surname (when he travels abroad, he simply repeats the name twice as he has discovered that the international bureaucracy of immigration officials usually demands two names to be registered!). Although I have known him for nearly two decades, I only discovered recently that the name that he is known by, to everybody, is not his given name. As a child he showed particular educational promise and was given the opportunity to take up a place at a good school that had already been promised to a village friend of his (the friend had acquired another offer in a different school). By agreement, he simply took the name of the child that he was replacing and retained that name for the rest of his life. (He occasionally meets his namesake, who is still a friend).
My introduction to naming the land that surrounded me was by learning the Gaelic names of the hills and the rivers, valleys, shorelines, that I was walking over. This awareness illuminates and frequently explains the details of landscape when you can understand the language of naming. To offer another comparison, there are at least five simultaneous ways to name a person in the Gaelic language.
- There is their name in Gaelic; e.g. Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn
- Their same name in the English language – John Smith (Some people may have their birth name registered ‘officially’ in English, yet never be called by that name).
- Their patronymic name, i.e. who do they come from? e.g. Iain Mac a’ Ghobha, Mhic Alasdair, Mhic Domhnaill Ruaidh (John, son of the Smith, son of Alexander, son of Donald the red – probably referring to his reddish complexion or ginger hair).
- Then there is also the possibility of a nickname, or a descriptive name, because there may well be several of this same name in the school class or the village. So, the person might be named Iain Mòr (Big John) or perhaps some obscure nickname given by his friends in jest because of his appearance, or his hobby, or his similarity to a contemporary celebrity.
- Lastly, there may be a pet-name, or familiar name, that is most commonly used to identify the person. So, Domhnall (Donald) might get called Dan, in a similar way to the English name, Elizabeth, being rendered as Liz, or Lizzie, Betty, or Beth.
It is not uncommon for the relations, friends, and neighbours of a person to alternate between ALL of these different names, depending upon to whom they are speaking, and in what context. (Even the wife of John Smith may never refer to him by anything other than his nickname or familiar name). All of these names refer to the same person, but they may reflect a variety of our relationships with that person, or the level of intimacy, or simply the bond of familiarity (or not) that we share.
In the same way, we each inherit an affinity with the land and the landscape of our own habituated environment. Whether our ancestors have been living there for many generations, or whether we have relocated geographically and have only lived there for a very short time, we are all dependent, to a greater or lesser extent, on the land. It might only be that we walk around the locality, or that we own/rent the land that our house is built upon, but even the most tenuous link is unavoidable. Whether we choose to acknowledge the extent of our links is another matter. I have written in other places1 About such areas as An Gearrasdan. The original name for the area was Inbhir Lochaidh (Inverlochy), the mouth of the River Lochy, but in the pacification of the Highlands and Islands, it became a strategic point of defence and was named Fort William. To the Gaels who inhabited that place, it became known as An Gearrasdan – The Barracks. The place where the soldiers are – beware! Three names for the same locality, each sensibly descriptive, but each conveying such very different meanings. These multiple layers of naming and topographical understanding abound.
As I have tried to explore in other places2, an in-depth search into an immersive experience with the landscape that surrounds us in every direction will be slightly (or hugely) different for each one of us, and that will condition both the depth and the positioning of our own understanding. A friend of mine, who has moved to the island to settle, told me recently about the walks that he enjoys in the vicinity of his home. He included a mention of the beautiful ‘Bay of Pigs’ along the coast, which seemed incongruous to me, and a quick investigation revealed that the ‘pigs’ were in fact muc-mhara – ‘sea-pigs’ – whales – which given the high sea-view from the headland makes complete sense. These layers of meaning on the land are sometimes transparent, like the oddly named Mol Èire – twice-named, for this means ‘shingle beach’ in the two historical languages of the place. Sometimes successive cultures replace and re-name places, sometimes they simply adopt, adapt, and absorb. Each has an individual history, just like two people from the same family.
The collective agglomeration of those understandings by the whole community, is part of what we call ‘culture’, and although cultural values change, morph, diverge, and become rediscovered, the basis of that collective awareness remains as a framework against which we measure our perceptions and our perceptiveness as a society. The land, whether from the environmental, social, economic, historical, or political perspective, is the source and the foundation of all those nuances. The names that we give to the places in the landscape, no matter if it is their physical shape, their colour, their functional use, or their historical or spiritual legacy, are the foundations of our awareness of who we are and how we come to be precisely here. That is why an appreciation of the naming of the landscape is important.
References
- Rennie, F. (1998). Land, culture, and the future of rural communities. The Lews Castle College Rural Lecture 1998. Stornoway: Lews Castle College ISBN 0-9533808-0-7. Available at: https://www.lews.uhi.ac.uk/t4-media/one-web/lews/research/contact/prof-frank-rennie/prof-frank-rennie-publications/LandCultureandtheFutureofRuralCommunities.pdf
- Rennie, F. (2020). The Changing Outer Hebrides: Galson and the meaning of Place. Stornoway: Acair. ISBN: 978-1-78907-083-5.
- Rennie, F. (2020). Space, Place, and Grace: perceptions of a nisomaniac. Chapter in Between Islands (pp 33-45. Stornoway: Published by Acair for An Lanntair. ISBN 978-1-78907-084-2.
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