The collation of data on early forms of Galloway's placenames was Daphne Brooke's life's work, and at the very end of her life she supervised the transfer of the data from the index cards on which she had always kept them in longhand onto a database. After her death I put the database on line, but for a number of reasons that first version is no longer available.

This site represents the database restored from backups. It is not certain that the backups I still had were the latest version of the database at the time the original was lost.

Caveats

Data

The data represents as comrehensive a view of the locations of named places in Galloway recorded in all documents anywhere prior to 1600AD and known at the time of Daphne Brooke's death as it was possible to achieve. She considered her work on cataloguing substantially complete. She had consulted in the original many documents and charters in libraries all over Britain and in the Vatican, as well as many published texts. She read medieval English, Scots, Welsh and Latin with considerable fluency. She was also a well regarded paleographer. However, medieval scribes' handwriting was not always excellent, and some documents have deteriorated over time; so some transcriptions are tentative. There may also be documents either recently catalogued or unkown in her lifetime which hold placenames not included here.

Not fully validated

Daphne Brooke died before the transcription to database was completed. She was extremely protective of her data, and had not fully validated or approved the transcription. Also, as stated above, I am not certain that the version used here is the final version that was created in her lifetime. The canonical record is Daphne Brooke's index cards, which are now held by Kirkcudbright Museum.

Locations

Resolution

Daphne Brooke recorded locations only to the one-kilometer OS grid square; this data therefore does not show any finer resolution are present.

Unknown locations

Some locations of places recorded in medieval documents have not been confidently identified on modern maps. Where a location was unkonwn, Daphne Brooke left the location blank on her index cards. In order to make the database work, in transcribing we used NX0000 (a point in the Irish Sea west of the Isle of Man) to represent some unknown locations, and national grid origin to represent others. There's no systematic reason for this inconsistency and it should be corrected; however, my objective at this stage is to make the data available without altering it.

Other Lacunae

Where parish is recorded as '[Unknown]', it simply means that the parish was not recorded on the index card. In most cases it's clear from the map what the parish should be, although some parish boundaries did change through the period..

Mistranscription

There are certainly some mistranscribed locations (the map makes this very easy to see!), and that makes it probable that there are some other mistranscriptions.

Simon Brooke, 10th August 2014