Given it is early May and the cuckoos are back in Carrick, this week’s featured lost name is Net Whowaig or Geks Seit. Only attested once, in the Blaeu atlas, it is shown as a farm, close to a the surviving holding of Corphin (perhaps Còrr Pheighinn ‘prominent pennyland’) Barr at approx. NX 284 965.

Watson (CPNS p.355) derives Net Whowaig from Gaelic Nead Chuthaig ‘cuckoo’s nest’. A nice name for a farm!

Ainmean Charraige is compiling a database of as many historic forms of place and personal names from Carrick. This will enable analysis of their meanings, distribution and character. We believe they will tell us a lot about the history of Carrick. The database already has c.8000 entries and is growing all the time. Interim results will be presented by Colin Mackenzie at the conference: Carrick’s Gaelic Heritage, The Carrick Centre, Maybole 14 Sept 24.

One thing we have noticed already: there seems to have been a significant ‘extinction event’ for the Gaelic version of many Carrick farm-names around the time of the reformation.

DULE is Scots ‘grief, sorrow, misery; suffering’ and a dule-tree is a ‘gallows tree’. [1] This term appears three times in our database of Carrick place-names: Dule Tree, Maybole; The Dool Trees, Straiton; and The Dule Tree (Kirkmichael). The Kirkmichael tree is famous from the folktale of John Faa who, along with his men, was hanged on it by the Earl of Cassillis.