THE REAL MACKAY: What’s in a name - and the hardiness of ancestors
Ever wonder where the castle is in Castletown? And what kirk is it that they talk about in Halkirk?
Is lather-on-the-wheel a literal reference to the hard work horses once had to exert to negotiate the village’s steep braes?
And what must visitors to the county think when they have to cut inland across the often bleak A9 causeway-across-the-mire to Thurso, what we call the cassiemire?!
The Dunbeath novelist Neil Gunn saw something else in the austere, flat and windswept moorlands. Looking out across that endless vista he saw a “final serenity”, Proclaiming that he knew of no other landscape in Scotland whose grandeur left the mind “free and ennobled”.
Local places names have changed down the years. Once Nordic, then Celtic, sometimes Gaelic and laterally anglicised until we are left with corruptions of the original.
Even the origins of county’s name are contested! I prefer the old name Katanes, “the headland of the Cat people” referring to Duncansby headland which, according to Gunn, “is the true end (or beginning) of the Kingdom of Scotland”.
Apparently, the study of place names is called toponymy. But this week I leant another new word: noscomephobia, an intense fear of hospitals which in extreme cases can prevent anxious sufferers from accessing essential medical care.
I know this only because I was trying to research the name Myrelandhorn where some of my maternal family ancestors, the Mansons, came from. They had a small farm on the mireland, in the county’s Kirk district. By all accounts it was a tough existence for the God-fearing and very superstitious people who lived there.
On Christmas Day before sunrise, according to local legend, folk felt obligated to leave small gifts – perhaps a sliver coin or a food offering - at the remains of the former St Duthac chapel. A primitive remnant from a past ecclesiastical age. By all accounts their offerings quickly disappeared!
I had a great grandmother, Euphemia Alexander Manson, who lived in a crofthouse at Myrelandhorn. It still stands to this day. She took noscomephobia to an extreme.
Apparently, it all stemmed from the traumatic loss of a son who died in hospital, just a boy, from a fatal liver disease. It must have tipped poor Euphemia over the edge. So much so that, years later, when her own health deteriorated, the local physician, none other than the county’s eminent Dr John Alexander, tried to have Euphemia, I imagine her called Effie, admitted to hospital when a septic leg condition turned gangrenous. Effie was having none of it!
The condition deteriorated and without the urgent surgery she required her life hung in the balance. But she was stubborn and adamant.
There was only one way round it and the crofthouse kitchen at Myrelandhorn was scrubbed with carbolic soap to within an inch of its life and Effie’s leg was sawed off as she lay anaesthetised on the kitchen table. Talk about a hardy breed!
A previous parish zealot, Dr Richard Merchistoun, determined to drive out the superstitious scourge that afflicted his flock, and sought vengeance by pulling down an effigy of St. Fergus in Wick. He was warned no good would come of it and, indeed, his body was fished out the river the next day.
Effie hobbled on with life, unbowed and undeterred.