Scandinavian-Britain

222 SCANDINAVIAN BRITAINGaelic and Welsh names, not infrequent in Cumberland,are more frequent north of Solway, and showthat the settlement did not drive out the earlierpopulation there is no area so exclusively Scandinavianas to suggest that a clearance was made by:forcible invasion ;but the Norse names are, as usual,thicker on the coast, and fade away thence inland.The name of the Solway itself can hardly be fromthat of the Selgovae who inhabited Galloway inRoman times ;the termination is surely the Norsevdgr, a creek, and the characteristic of this estuary isits tidal bore ;whence one istemptedto connect itwith soil, "swill," and solmr, "the swell of the sea."The stone carvings of Dumfriesshire, so far as theycan be judged from Mr. Romilly Allen's great volumeon the Early Christian Monuments of Scotland,seem to be wholly of pre-Viking period. There aresplendid works of the Anglian church at Ruth well,Hoddam, Thornhill, Closeburn and elsewhere. Theabsence of relics of the Viking Age may perhaps beexplained by their presence in the neighbourhoodof Whithorn. We find, for example, an interestingseries at Whithorn itselfshowing an evident transitionfrom Anglian work to debased floral scrolls, hammerheadcrosses, broken ring-plaits and ruder cutting,characteristic of the Viking period in Cumberlandand Yorkshire. At Aspatria in Cumberland is a curiousincised slab with the Norse Swastika ; this is paralleledby a slab from Craignarget on Luce Bay, and thehammerhead slab with rude crucifix and barbarousscroll-work from Kirkcolmon Loch Ryan resembles the