May Williamson: The Non-Celtic Place-Names of the Scottish Border ...

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Ermine Street, north of Hadrian’s Wall, was known as Dere Street: Deorestrete, c 1050 (12 th )
SD; Dere- 1150 (16 th ) Dryb; 1206 (c 1320) Kelso; Derestredt, 1165-77 LSMM. This is OE
Dera strt, “street of the Deirans”.
The people of Deira are Deiri, c 730 (8 th ) Bede, and Deira is Dearne rice (dat), 634 (12 th )
ASC(E); provincia Deirorum, c 1110 Flo Wig. A Welsh spelling, Dewr, late 6 th (13 th )
Goddodin, shows that the British name of the district was Deivr, Deifr. This was adopted by
the Anglians (cf IPN i, 21). The use of a tribal name in the genitive plural with strt is seen in
names of other Roman roads, Watling Street and Ermine Street (DEPN, 477; 12 – Arrington).
These two names are not primary constructions, being taken /xx/ from original place-names,
but grammatically they are comparable to Dere Street.
BRITONS IN SOUTH SCOTLAND
Our knowledge of the pre-English inhabitants is derived from Ptolemy and Tacitus, and from
the later writings of Gildas and Nennius.
The Brigantes, who gave their name to Bernicia, or derived it from the name of the district
(IPN, ib), extended, we are told, “from sea to sea”, and perhaps occupied most of
Northumberland, Berwick, Roxburgh and Cumberland. North of them, and on the east coast
were the Votadini, whose name is the Brythonic equivalent of the Goedelic Gododin,
Guotodin, employed in the phrase “Manau of the Guotodin”, applying perhaps to a district on
the upper Forth (PN WLth, xvi). On the west were the Selgovae who may have occupied
Dumfriesshire. Their name seems to be Goedelic, by its initial s- from OCelt h-, a change
which does not occur in Old British. It is likely that the frontiers of several tribes met in the
region of Selkirk. In the Yarrow valley a tombstone commemorates two brothers of the
Damnonii, a people generally supposed to inhabit an area around Stirling.
Ptolemy supplies a list of the cities of the various tribes but since those in South Scotland,
with /xxi/ the exception of Trimontium, cannot be identified, they are of interest mainly to the
Celtic scholar.
All the documentary evidence of the history of the Britons before the 6 th century is gleaned
from a few references in Historia Brittonum, Nennius, the Welsh heroic poetry and early
Gaelic sources. The information is meagre, inaccurate and often apparently contradictory.
That there was a large Celtic population in South Scotland is attested to by the great numbers
of hill-forts scattered over the more mountainous districts, and by the persistence of so many
Brythonic elements in place-names. It is possible that some of the Arthurian battles were
fourght in this area, perhaps against invading Anglo-Saxons, or perhaps against the Picts and
Scots. For a discussion on the historicity of Arthur and the sites of the various battles
attributed to him by Nennius, v. Antiquity, 1935: Arthur and his Battles, by O.G.S. Crawford,
pp 277-291.
At the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions the whole of South Scotland was occupied by
Brythonic Celts. It was not until the 9 th century that Scots began to inhabit Lothian, although
no doubt they had been filtering into upper Nithsdale from Ayrshire for some time previously.
/xxii/ The survival of a greater number of British place-names and place-name elements in
South Scotland than in any other area colonised by the Anglo-Saxons seems to indicate that a