St Andrews: A Watery Linguistic History

How we can etymologise placenames to uncover lost landscapes

*Correction: The illustration for this article has been taken down due to its creative similarities to an original illustration by Elle Miller, a copyrighted design for the University of St Andrews Shop

Did you know that any placenames ending in -ey or -ay refer to an island? 

It is fairly clear why Scottish islands like Orkney, Rothesay, Colonsay, and Raasay, surrounded by water, are thus named. In southwest Oxfordshire, however, the most landlocked region in England, these “ey” sounds also confusingly litter maps and signposts. The villages of Pusey, Goosey, and Charney are utterly inconceivable as islands — but when this flat landscape was marsh, these villages would have been mini sanctuaries from floodplains where it was difficult or unsafe to build settlements. The only presence of natural water left in the village I call home is a singular chalk stream, an offshoot of the once torrenting Ock, which gives the nearby city, Oxford, its name. Bone-dry and dusty in the summer months, a playground for hares and rabbits, the river is the last trace of water systems that once ruled, and labelled, Oxfordshire. 

These linguistic histories are not difficult to decipher — hidden in plain sight, as the cliché goes — and help us to better grasp the worn landscape history of our little town in Scotland, too. 

In St Andrews, most of the placenames are seemingly simple — Grannie Clark’s Wynd? Probably where Grannie Clark lived. The plethora of streets, beaches, and even houses with one of the four dials of a compass incorporated into their names? Simply makes it easier to get around. Butt’s Wynd? Hopefully, a less straightforward explanation can be found for that one.

River and waterway names are where the fluctuating history of St Andrews becomes more interesting.

As early as 1160, the word Kines, accompanied by the Latin word for river, fluuius, appears in writing. Sites along the Kinessburn are much studied by Earth Science and Sustainable Development students, but the linguistic history of the river unveils something that even the physical landscape, shaped and hollowed by the river, does not remember. 

Burn means fresh water in Gaelic — simply enough, here it means flowing water. Kines is more difficult to pin down — one Glasgow University study links it to the “fall” (eas in Old Scots) of water from a headland (ceann). Ceanneas, then kines, then kiness. The evolution of the word itself mimics the river’s rampant reshaping and realigning of the land around St Andrews — on no OS map can a waterfall be identified on the Kinessburn’s route — a ghost terrain maintains its eerie presence in the local conversations, signs, and history. 

Even pubs are not immune to this watery etymology. The Rule takes its name from the tower still standing in the Cathedral ruins — marking the site that St Rule deposited the bones of St Andrews after he exhumed them from what is now the Peloponnese in Greece. That damp journey from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, while folkloric, landed the remains less than half a mile from the sea. 

The Anglicisation of these placenames often masks their real meaning — the various Scots and Gaelic etymologies vary and are extremely culturally dependent, but are more insightful into the ancient pilgrim site’s history. 

It is not only recently, however, that the language used to describe this town has been scrubbed of its Scottish twang: a map made by John Geddy, a student here in 1580, only labels the“collegi”, colleges, in Latin. “Mariani,” “Saluatoris,” “Leonardi” — St Madras, St Salvator, and St Leonard. The Latinate, Christian universe has held a firm grip over the language we use to talk about St Andrews for thousands of years.

St Andrews’ naming tradition, searidden as it is, traces the journeys of humans as well as of the natural world throughout its time as a settlement, combining histories of pilgrimage, fables of lost landscapes, and our human obsession with water into one. On our mass migrations to the library this upcoming revision week, sluicing like a river trying to find empty chairs at 8:15 am, perhaps we can slow down, look around, and try to find more evidence of our communal history, and remember that we form an ever-growing part of it, too.