Medionemeton
Attested: Medionemeton at position 196 in the Ravenna Cosmography
Where: Somewhere around the middle of the Antonine Wall. Bar Hill Roman fort at NS707759 is the top candidate.
Name origin: Medio- obviously meant something like ‘in the middle’, but of what? 40 or so modern places in France with names apparently descended from Mediolanum are topographically incompatible with the old idea of ‘middle of a plain’ and are a better fit to something like ‘neutral meeting ground between several tribes’ (Lacroix 2007: 194-199). Nemeton is generally translated as ‘sanctuary’, often described as “Celtic” because the word has survived best in Irish, and associated with trees because of Latin nemus, but all that deflects attention from the key point that a nemeton was somewhere that people gathered, which needed some kind of visible marker. See here for a clear description by Watson (1926) of how this ancient pagan tradition survived into Christian times and contributed to many Scottish place names.
Notes: Almost anywhere near the middle of the central belt of Scotland might, in principle, serve as a meeting place for people coming from the areas around modern Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Stirling. The most prominent natural marker is Bar Hill, which Graham Robb argued for strongly, upon the theory that it was a pivot point for Roman surveying. It has a superb view over the landscape, would have been easy for travellers to find because of the river Kelvin, and might have been on a tribal frontier. Other suggestions have included Cairnpapple Hill (see Pigott, 1948) at at NS987718, which is well off the Wall to the south, and Peel Park, Kirkintilloch whose Norman motte mound might be a former nemeton or moot place, where a word often spelled cruc in Welsh or crec/cric in English evolved here into kirk.
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Last edited 22 January 2023 To main Menu