Gaelic in Ayrshire Part 1

Siorramachd Inbhir Àir (Ayrshire) agus Gàidhealtachd na Carraige (Carrick).

The following article is a translation of the original Gaelic article written by Girvan MacKay which appeared in the magazine Gairm.

MacAoidh, G. (1979). Gàidhlig ann an Siorramachd Inbhir-Àir. Gairm. 106, 134-40.

When the daughter of our old school master married, she left the island and went to live in Irvine, Ayrshire. The last time we heard from her she said that she couldn't keep up with the number of people in the town that wanted to learn Gaelic. They heard that she was a Skye woman and a number of people came to her asking her to teach "our old language" to them. As she had studied Gaelic at Higher level, she was not unwilling and she started a small class.

Now, Irvine is bang in the middle of the area that the call "Burns Country", and if anyone thinks, (particularly Ayrshire folk) about the speech of area, it's Scots, or at least a mixture of Scots and English, like that which Burns used, that comes to mind. If we look carefully at the map of Ayrshire we'll see that the majority of place-names are Gaelic. There are English place-names there too, especially in the North, but these are neither the oldest, nor the most common in the area. The further we go towards South Ayrshire and Carrick, the more scarce the English names become and the more common the Gaelic names become and the more it becomes clear that Carrick was the heart of the Southern Gàidhealtachd (Gaelic speaking area), and in an era not too far from us that part of the country was more Gaelic than the Western Isles. The people of Irvine were therefore correct when they said that they wanted to learn "our old language".

Certainly its not too far back in the history of Scotland that the people of Ayrshire ceased to speak Gaelic. It's surprising how long the language endured in the South. In the book Leabhar Bàrdachd na Gàidhlig, t.d.  xxi, Dr William Watson wrote:

"As regards to the geographical distribution, we find no poets south of the Firth or Clyde: Gaelic was becoming obsolescent in Galloway and Ayrshire by the beginning of the modern period i.e. ca. (1600).

"Dr T. M. Murray Lyon, Edinburgh  has informed me of a note left by his father, as follows; 'My grand-aunt, Jean MacMurray, who died in 1836 at the age of 87, has informed me that Margaret MacMurray, the representative of the elder branch of the MacMurrays of Cultzeon, near Maybole, who died at a very advanced age about the year 1760, was long talked of as having been the last Gaelic-speaking native of Carrick.' Robert was born near Ayr in 1759 - 'upon the Carrick border' ".

However, the dear doctor was not completely correct at all when he said that the language was becoming 'obsolescent' as early as that. On the authority of papers such as "The Persistence of Gaelic in Galloway and Carrick" (W.L. Lorimer), and other sources, Pádraig Ó Snodaigh attested in his book Hidden Ulster that Gaelic was spoken in the South of Scotland as late as the nineteenth century at least. Someone once said to me that there were a small handful of people Gaelic speakers alive in Galloway in our own century (i.e. 20th century). Ó Snodaigh wrote as follows;

"Always to be remembered in the context of the language question is that the Gaelic language was spoken over a much wider area of Scotland in the 17th. century than is often realised. Galloway and Ayrshire, for example - areas from which many of the Scottish planters came - were to a considerable extent Gaelic-speaking then (T.F. O'Rahilly, Irish Dialects Past and Present, pp. 161-164); it is said that the last record Gaelic speaker in Carrick, Ayrshire, died as late as 1760, though there is evidence for continuity in the area much later than that [W.J. Watson, Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig, for the Carrick reference. But old people still spoke Gaelic in Glen Barr in 1820; an elderly woman spoke it in Ballantrae c. 1830; and Alexander Murray (1775 - 1813), sometime professor of Oriental Languages at Edinburgh University - a herd's son from Kirkcudbright - had Gaelic as his first language (A. Archibald, Letters to Me, October, 1972)].

Gàidhealtachd na Carraige (Carrick): Looking out to Creag Aillse (Ailsa Craig) from Tùrnbuirg (Turnberry)

We have evidence therefore that Gaelic was spoken in Glen Barr, close to Girvan, and in Ballantrae. 

There are Gaelic place-name elements in some of the most common names of the map of the Scottish mainland, e.g.: 

Achadh - Field
Allt - Stream
Baile - Town
Bàrr - Summit, peak 
Bealach - Mountain pass
Beinn - Mountain
Beith - Birch
Cathair -  City
Carraig - Rock
Cill(e) - Chapel, Church, Cell
Cnoc - Hill 
Coire - Corrie
Craobh - Tree
Cùil - Recess
Dail - Field
Darach - Oak
Dealg -  Pin
Driseag - Thorn bush
Druim - Ridge
Dubh - Black
Dùn - Fort
Eaglais - Church
Eala - Tomb, sepulchre
Eun - Bird
Gall - Foreigner
Gart - Field 
Gleann - Glen
Iubhar - Yew
Leac - Flagstone
Lag - Hollow
Lèana - Water meadow
Linn - Deep pool
Loch - Lake
Magh - Plain 
Maol -  Mull, rounded promontory
Peighinn - Pennyland
Roinn - Partition
Sràid - Street
Sròn - Promontory (lit. Nose)
Tiobar (Tobar) - Well
Tòrr - Mound
Tràigh - Beach

As there were no recording devices around before the last native speaker died, we cannot be sure what the Gaelic of Ayrshire sounded like. Perhaps we can learn something from the form of place-names in English. However, there are sounds that are not at all certain. At any rate, the majority of Gaelic place-names here are easily recognisable, even in English form, and the sound is not massively different from the words as they would have been heard in other parts of the Gàidhealtachd where the language was not too extensive or too rare.

To be continued in Part 2...