Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve meant to learn Gaelic for several years, but always lacked the impetus. In my defence, Gaelic has been dead in Galloway for three centuries; it’s hard to find people who study the language and make use of it here.

I spent many happy months in the Western Isles listening to Gaelic being spoken as a first language, but I always knew that my lowland heritage went back to something different. Scotland is far too big and complex to be thought of as a single entity, and while my crofting pals in Harris taught me a great deal about their culture, I would have felt the same in Wales or Eire. I’m drawn to learn Gaelic because I know it will tell me something about Galloway, but that direct connection has grown fuzzy and obscure with misuse. And it’s hard to pick up a language from the dry pages of a textbook, particularly when your interest is grounded in life and nature.

But I was nudged back towards Gaelic again last week while pondering a map of Low Airie and the surrounding landscape. I’m always drawn to the riddle of place-names, particularly in Galloway where centuries of languages have overlapped to create a quilt of words from Pictish to Norse via Gaelic and into Scots. We have some thrilling place-names in Galloway, from Curlywee to Mulwarchar – and we also have some really dull names too. Without being deliberately provocative, the most boring names are often the English ones – try “Mid Hill” for example – it’s surely better that a hill should have no name than bear such a boring title. I only hope that “Mid Hill” did not replace something older and more interesting, and that the name was given only because the hill in question was found to be nameless.

I find myself fiddling at place-names all the time. There are a few generic terms like achad (field), dun (fort), bar (farm) which crop up all over the place, and once you have half a key, it’s hard to stop yourself puzzling at the rest.

There is a farm which lies on the old road to Low Airie. It’s called Slogarie (pronounced with emphasis on second syllable – sl’GAIRie), and I began to wonder if the name meant something like “road to the Airie”. But place-names are famously inconsistent, and the words are often corrupted in different ways. My family’s farm Slongaber seems to originate from the Gaelic Sron Ghabair (goat ridge). That’s quite a shift in spelling, but I’m also aware that the pronunciation of Slongaber has even changed in the last seventy years. I say slon-GAY-buh, but there are still people living in the village who call it slon-GAR-bah, which is probably closer to the original Gaelic.

Either way, I began to wonder if Slogarie had been similarly corrupted from “Sron garie”, which would leave me to puzzle out what “garie” meant. There are lots of garies and gairys in Galloway, the most famous being the Black Gairies at the back of the Merrick – those gairies are vast, desperate cliffs which tumble down for hundreds of feet beyond the mountain summit and are filled with ravens and bones.

For some reason, this puzzle began to gnaw away at me during long, quiet hours at work on the hill. Even when I got home to bed, the thought remained with me. In the end, a quick google search took me to The Journal of Scottish Place Names, which flagged up an analysis of the Gaelic word sliabh (pronounced “slew”). I’ve seen variants of this word before in Irish place-names which denote a mountain (slieve) and also on the Isle of Man, where there are several hills called Slieau.

The Journal of Scottish Place Names confirmed that the Gaelic word sliabh is often used to describe mountains in Irish Gaelic and Manx, but there was an important distinction when the word was used in Scotland. Here, sliabh often referred to rough moorland grazing, and there is a thrilling reason why – sliabh is also an ancient name for purple moor grass – the thick, tussocky vegetation which dominates the landscape across large areas of the Galloway hills. In a national context, this grass has many names, from “flying bent” in Yorkshire and Northern England (derived from the German/Saxon “beont” meaning stiff grass) to ribbon grass, whitings and purple moor grass (so called because the seed heads are purplish). Purple moor grass often acts like an invasive species which can easily dominate a landscape and is often implicated in the loss of heather coverage. The fact that it has so many names and has meant such a great deal to rural cultures across the UK implies that it has always been a significant plant.

The discussions around sliabh in place-names get very technical, but it’s clear that in Scottish Gaelic, sliabh was often an agricultural term used to denote rough, seasonal grazing – it was used in direct contrast to achad (field or cultivatable land) – and so the word for hill grazing was almost interchangeable with the name given to the species of grass which dominated that kind of land.

In a roundabout kind of way, I take a small step towards understanding the meaning of Slogarie, which the article in Journal of Scottish Place Names reckoned was probably originally pronounced as slew-GAIRie. The “gairy” still needs to be unpicked, but there’s no doubt that sliabh is a good fit for that rough, moorland place.

Maybe I’ve been piling tangents upon tangents and following my nose to madness. But I am thrilled by the discovery of sliabh, which seems to represent far more than just part of a nearby place-name. Sliabh is a very ancient word used to describe and lend colour to a landscape which English often lumps together under the dull, cover-all expression “moorland”. Sliabh is not just moorland, but rather a specific (and extremely familiar) kind of moorland dominated by white grass and suitable for seasonal grazing. Just as the “eskimos” are said (apocryphally) to have a hundred different words for snow, I’m keen to retain sliabh as a way of adding a little more nuance to my own landscape.

It’s easy to make old connections through agriculture, but having stumbled upon sliabh, I begin to wonder what else I am missing. At first I thought that learning Gaelic was a nice side-project. Now I think it’s unavoidable.

*updated 17/4/20 after helpful comments from readers…