Читать книгу Walking in the Pentland Hills. 30 walks in Edinburgh's local hills онлайн

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I have drawn heavily on Stuart Harris’s The Place Names of Edinburgh, Their Origins and History (see bibliography), and some research was undertaken by the Scottish Place-Name Society, so if this is an area of interest for you, it may be worth looking at www.spns.org.uk.

Dialect words

A number of words in the text may be unfamiliar to readers, so a brief glossary is included as Appendix C. These are local terms used for places and wildlife. The word ‘cleuch’ (or sometimes ‘cleugh’, used chiefly by map makers) is used often and means a narrow valley. ‘Bealach’ is a pass or saddle between two hills, sometimes termed a col. I have used the local phrase ‘drystane dyke’ to describe a wall built without mortar.

‘Peewit’, ‘whaup’ and ‘laverock’ (lapwing, curlew and skylark respectively) are birds you will probably encounter on a walk in the Pentlands. Personally, I like these names, and encourage their continued use.

Old maps

The British Isles are very well served in terms of maps. The practise of making maps stretches back centuries, with a variety of reasons for their production – military, land holding, legal and fiscal, and so on – and the late 19th century saw a rise in the use of maps as an aid to walking and recreation. The earliest maps referred to in this book are: Adair’s maps of Midlothian and West Midlothian, from 1682; A and M Armstrong’s Map of the Three Lothians, surveyed in 1773; Roy’s 1753 Military Survey of Scotland; Knox’s 1812 Edinburgh and Its Environs. After this the Ordnance Survey provides the basis for today’s cartography, with foundations laid by the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1852 onwards.