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In the early 20th century, OS published a brief booklet on Gaelic words most frequently used on its maps. It was enlarged in 1951 and 1968. The current 2005 Guide to Gaelic Origins of Place-names in Britain is much larger, and runs to 36 pages of alphabetically listed toponyms, with definitive examples and grid references. It is available online at:

http://www.gaelicplace-names.org/index.php

As one of its authors states elsewhere:

We have become such slaves to the alphabet that we frequently forget its very nature of mere convenience, and tend to look upon its sequence … as something which … classifies or categorises beyond the order which it imposes … Indeed this seemingly convenient tool is the enemy of all classification.

(Nicolaisen 2001 2)

With this caveat in mind, a greatly expanded version of the ‘Guide to Gaelic Origins of Place-names in Britain’ has been compiled here and divided into 7 categories and 23 sub-categories. The system chosen is based on the ideas of Meto Vroom, a Dutch academic, and will be familiar to many landscape architects. In his scheme, landscape is classified according to three interacting horizontal layers: the abiotic or non-living at the bottom, the biotic or living in the middle and occupational or cultural layer uppermost (ssss1). Place-name categories in Gaelic can easily be attached to such names such as: creag (rock), darach (oak) and baile (township). The top layer can be developed further by considering Patrick Geddes’s trio of ‘Place, Work, Folk’ to classify categories of land use, occupation and people, which would give àirigh (shieling), ceàrd (smith) and gille (boy). These layers themselves often influence one another, literally from the ground up.