Celts in the Americas by Michael Newton

Author:Michael Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Shamus Y. MacDonald

Micro-Toponymy in Gaelic Nova Scotia:

Some Examples from Central Cape Breton

Gaelic speakers named much of the natural and built landscape they encountered during their daily lives in Nova Scotia, including small features like brooks, hills, hollows and bridges. Larger aspects of the local environment, such as mountains and lakes, were also named as part of this process. Employed for generations but relevant only within a limited geographic area, such place names were common but rarely made official.

In recent years, bilingual highway signs featuring traditional Gaelic place names have been erected at a number of key locations in eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. In many ways, they represent a welcome, and tangible, reminder of the extent of Highland settlement in the province. For obvious reasons, however, such signs are usually restricted to marking major geographical sites, such as towns, villages and county boundaries. In this chapter, I will focus on the larger, but more localized, Gaelic place name tradition in Nova Scotia.

As we might expect, historical publications and modern fieldwork have preserved many Gaelic place names in Nova Scotia. Often, however, they are embedded within stories or songs and their inclusion in the historical record is incidental and peripheral to the fieldworker’s initial research goals. Such is not always the case, however. Kenneth Nilsen, for example, published a list of more than fifty place names collected from the last generation of native Gaelic speakers on the mainland of the province. Approximately 20 per cent of these are the highly localized variety on which this paper is based: Tobar nam Bòcan (Well of the Ghosts) and Drochaid na Cailleachag (The Bridge of the Little Old Woman) are two examples (Nilsen 1991). Jeff MacDonald, in his undergraduate thesis, also provides a list of minor place names. Collected from native speakers in southern Inverness County, these names include Loch nan Gillean Ruadh (Lake of the Red Boys), Tobar Nìll (Neil’s Well) and Drochaid a’ Chlachair (The Mason’s Bridge) (MacDonald 1992). Extensive fieldwork, conducted over many years by Jim Watson, has also resulted in the collection of local place names in Cape Breton. Many of these are now on a website hosted by the Office of Gaelic Affairs (2010).

Although minor place names enjoy limited currency outside their home communities, they often contain important information about settlement patterns, commemorate traditional activities and occupations, and perpetuate local oral traditions. In an article focused on how Bòcan Brook, Inverness County, was named, Gordon MacLennan makes clear the value of working with place names to unlock oral traditions by highlighting three local variants of this etiological legend (MacLennan 1984).

As a result of ongoing collaboration with local tradition bearers, I have been able to collect more than a hundred Gaelic place names from central Cape Breton. This fieldwork, based in Iona and Christmas Island, includes outlying settlements traditionally considered part of the informal parish boundaries of these communities. In this way, a regional sense of identity rather than formal borders guides this research.

Immigrants from the Island of Barra, Scotland, settled this region during the early years of the 19th century.

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