The Place-Names of the Galloway Glens
This project, part of the Galloway Glens Landscape Partnership, is dedicated to exploring the heritage of Kirkcudbrightshire through its place-names. Place-names are a marvellous resource, allowing people to get in touch with the ‘intangible heritage’ of the past, seeing how people interacted with the environment round about them; seeing what they chose to commemorate and sometimes getting a glimpse of why.
Since 2018, we have been surveying the place-names of seven historical parishes of Kircudbrightshire which overlap with the Galloway Glens Landscape Partnership project area. The parishes in question are: Carsphairn, Dalry, Kells, Balmaclellan, Balmaghie, Parton and Crossmichael.
That surveying work, primarily by Gilbert Márkus, is now largely complete, and we have made the results available via an online searchable database, which you will find here or by clicking on “Place-Names” above. This is still a work in progress, and we will be very happy to hear from people with information regarding corrections and additions, especially any names we may have missed out (our base is the OS 6” 1st edition, so more modern or more minor names may not be on it), or early forms for any names that are there. We will continue to augment and refine the site into the future.
The blogs you will find under Project News give some insights into what we have been up to and thinking about in the course of preparing the database. We will be adding more of these during the course of the year, to help introduce the material here. We will also be preparing other resources, such as guided walks based around place-names. Some of these will, we hope, be available over the course of 2023.
In due course, we hope to publish this material in book form, as part of The Survey of Scottish Place-Names: The Place-Names of Kirkcudbrightshire, Volume 1: The Glenkens Parishes.