The book Arran; - Cook Clan

8 THE BOOK OF ARRAN
About the end of the seventeenth century Martin remarks
as follows :
' The inhabitants of this isle (Arran) are well
proportioned, generally brown, and some of a black complexion.'
^ By that time, of course, other streams had passed
into the current, but isolated and sharply defined centres
are conservative of the stock, the very conditions operating
towards uniformity.
If the song the Sirens sang be considered ' not beyond
conjecture,' then it may be permitted to give a name to, at
least, the dominating people in Arran of the first century
A.D., when Agricola sailed the pioneer Roman ship across the
Firth of Clyde and mastered the hitherto unknown tribes
on its coasts. Roman knowledge, of this time, appears on
the map of the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, who
flourished in the first half of the second century. In this
map the Mull of Kintyre is ' the Epidion Height,' for which
the equivalent in ancient Irish literature is
' Ard Echdi,'
where ep and ech are the corresponding phonetic fragments
for ' horse ' in kindred but separate Celtic languages. The
peninsula is the land of the Epidii in Ptolemy ;
and the Irish
place is precisely stated to be ' in Kintyre '
{i Cinn Tire,
' the head of the land '). The non-Gaehc p shows that we
are dealing with the Pictish people and their more Welshlike
form of Celtic, and if the Picts were thus settled in the
nearer mainland it is fair to assume that they had also
established themselves in Arran, as, from Adamnan, we
know they had done in Skye. But if so, it does not yet
appear that they have left even a name to report their
presence. What older place-names in Arran are not Gaelic
are Norse. Ptolemy's map gives Scotland a curious twist
to the right, and the southern islands are thus dislodged
from their proper positions. But Malaeus is clearly Mull,
Adamnan's Malea ; east of it is placed Monaoeda, usually
accepted to be Man, but Skene, taking the reading Monarina,
• Martin's Western Islands (e. 1695), p. 224.