A remarkable community-driven onomastic project has just come to life in the Cairngorms. Over the past six months, 81 contributors - including mountaineers, gamekeepers, skiers, reindeer herders, ecologists, and Gaelic speakers - have collectively recorded 304 previously unmapped, “living” place names.
These names do not belong to official cartography but to lived experience: they reflect memory, practice, and local knowledge embedded in the landscape. The result is a new community map that captures a dynamic, vernacular layer of toponymy often overlooked by institutional mapping.
With the map now live online, upcoming launch events invite participants and the public to explore the stories behind these names. This project is a powerful reminder that landscapes are not only physical spaces, but also narrative and linguistic ecosystems, continuously shaped by those who inhabit them.
No comments:
Post a Comment