Reading the Gaelic Landscape: Leughadh Aghaidh na Tire

by John Murray

Following the success of the first edition, this new edition has been expanded and improved with additional images and enhanced drawings. The subject matter has been expanded with the chapter on grammar and pronunciation extended. There are examples of how Gaelic personal names and the human body are used in place-names and many etymological sources have been added to place-name tables. In addition to the generic index, there is now an index of specific place-names. Finally, there's more to say about hares, bears and boars!

Reading the Gaelic Landscape is essential for anyone who is interested in the Scottish Highlands and its native language. It enables people to read and understand place-names in Gaelic, providing insights into landscape character and history. The book enriches the experience of walkers, climbers, sailors, bird watchers and fishers by sketching the named context, where they practise their pursuits. Outdoor enthusiasts need no longer struggle with unfamiliar spellings and words, as they can develop a new perspective of place through an understanding of Gaelic toponymy.

The ways Gaelic poets like Sorley MacLean and Duncan Bàn Macintyre used the named landscape in their work is explored. Names are used to speculate about species extinctions and the history of the Caledonian Forest. Readers learn how place has been defined in Gaelic and how this has been recorded, through a deeper understanding of how native speakers applied their language to the landscape

Genres: Scotland, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. This is John^^^^^^^^^Murray.

John Murray was born in West Africa in 1954, and brought up in Fife and London. He has lived in Fife, London, Manchester and the Borders. He was formerly the Director of the school of Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art and is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Languages at the University of Edinburgh. He lives in Kelso in the Scottish Borders.

Murray's writing has been published in various Scottish magazines and anthologies, and his poetry and photography exhibition ‘Watermarks’, with John McGregor, has toured Scotland. His first poetry collection, Aspen, was published by Akros (1996) and his most recent is Chiaroscuro (diehard, 2001).

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who has been walking in the hills of Scotland, to my embarrassment I have struggled with the pronunciations and unknown derivations of many natural features of my country with Gaelic origins. This book didn't really fill in the blanks for me. I enjoyed it, but it is a bit dry, being more about the names on maps, rather than the people or stories that led to the naming. I would have liked better indexing, and more examples given for some Gaelic words. There were a few shaky arguments about the lack of forestry names on map as indicators of the non-existence of great forests in the past. Many good hill-walking books revel in the stories and history of mountain names, and maybe that was more what I had hoped for.

[Mairi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful and detailed account of Gaelic placenames.

[Michaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

More detailed than I needed for my purposes but an excellent resource.

[Declan Valters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very comprehensive explanations of Gaelic placenames in the Scottish landscape. The book is a good companion to any map of the Scottish Highlands or where Gaelic orthography is present. The book is useful as a reference (it contains many tables of placename-elements throughout the chapters) and also as a cover-to-cover read. The physical book is slightly let down by its poor quality binding which began to fall apart after a single thorough reading, but the author can hardly be blamed for that.