Forgotten Woodlands

If someday someone does this study for South Florida, they will wonder how a previously mountainous terrain became so flat. You can drive around and spot "Hills," "Heights,” “Ridge,” “Vista,” and “View” on pancake-flat sites. Hopefully there weren't ancient Scottish versions of real estate developers confounding this study.

In summer I live jn a place with a tiny dialect that like 6000 people still speak and when these reaearchers from X university come around I like making up plausible sounding words and telling them I heard my grandma say it at the hearth when I was a wee child

Im powering humanity forward

Speaking of forgotten woodlands, I've talked about this on HN two times already, might as well say it third time. Go on Google maps and look at the size of the Sherwood forest. I've never truly recovered from that experience.

"Gaelic has been spoken at one time or another in the whole of Scotland, barring the north of Caithness..."

It was spoken in the north of Caithness into the 20th century in Dounreay parish, and previously some other areas just to the west of Thurso. (There is evidence of past Gaelic usage in Dunnet parish, and if "the Caithness Book" is to be believed, even in Stroma, the most northerly part of Caithness.)

One of the ongoing debates in Scottish and Irish onomastics is about the Kil- prefix. It is usually connected with Cill meaning a monastic cell, but may be a corruption of Coille (wood) and Gil (a gill or ghyll). Kilduff in Fife may be Coille Dubh (black/dark wood). There are also names in Scotland referring to oaks, sacred groves and so on.

Names like Cults outside Aberdeen may refer to forests. Calton Hill in Edinburgh appears to refer to hazel trees. Beith/Beath in placenames may refer to birch trees.

This is without going into the Brythonic names, of which there are many.