CLOG (Univ. of Glasgow)

Editor, The

The Journal of Scottish Name Studies
The Future of the Journal
Publisher
From its inception in 2007, The Journal of Scottish Name Studies has been 
published by Clann Tuirc. From next year (2020), it will be published by Celtic 
and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow.
Editor(s)
To date, the journal has been edited by Simon Taylor (Vols 1–3) and jointly by 
Simon Taylor and Richard A. V. Cox (Vols 4–13). 
Vol. 14 is to be edited by guest editor Sarah Künzler, with Simon Taylor as 
consultant editor (Richard Cox has retired). It will contain articles resulting 
from a series of seminars led by Dr Künzler at the University of Glasgow on 
the overall theme of ‘Challenging perspectives: new approaches to the Scottish 
landscape through the study of place-names’.
Submissions
Submissions are welcome as usual. However, while shorter varia will be 
considered for inclusion in Vol. 14, main articles will be held back and considered 
for inclusion in Vol. 15.
The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 13, 2019, i–viii



English

The Future of the Journal

Ansell, Michael

Carsphairn and Dalmellington Re-visited

Notes on Contributors

Broderick, George

A Grammar of Manx Place-names

Gough-Cooper, Henry

Terry Kinder, ed.: Life on the Edge. The Cistercian Abbey of Balmerino, Fife (Scotland)

Gilbert, John M.

Place-names and Managed Woods in Medieval Scotland

Smith, Brian

The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 9, 2015, 1–4
Dr Doreen Jennifer Waugh died on 23 September 2015 after a long illness. 
As a tribute to all she did for Scottish place-name studies, and to the fact that 
she was a valued member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of 
Scottish Name Studies, we include in this issue of the Journal an obituary 
by Brian Smith, Shetland Archives, which appeared in The Shetland Times, 
Friday 1 October 2015. It is reproduced here with his kind permission, as well 
as that of The Shetland Times. It is followed by a bibliography of her published 
work, which well shows both the focus and the breadth of her scholarship. It 
was compiled by William (Willie) Waugh, Doreen’s husband, Eileen Brooke-
Freeman, Brian Smith and Simon Taylor.
Doreen Waugh
1944–2015
Doreen Waugh, Shetland’s foremost scholar of place-names, died last week. She 
had been seriously ill since 2008, but fought back, continued to work, and greeted 
her first grandchildren during her final years. She was 70.
She was the adopted daughter of Williamina Laurenson, who was eventually 
head teacher at Sand primary school, and her husband George. Doreen went to 
school at Sand, and then in the mid-fifties to the Anderson Institute in Lerwick. 
There, like others, she came under the influence of John and Lollie Graham, who 
taught her to love literature and language, not least her Shetland tongue.
At Edinburgh University she studied English language. She met a young 
geographer, Willie Waugh, whom she married in 1970. After graduating she 
worked for the British Council for a year, in Borås in Sweden, teaching English to 
businessmen. Back in Scotland she taught at Bathgate Academy, travelling by car 
daily on the notorious A8, and later at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh.
It was during 10 years at home, having children and looking after them, that she 
became interested in names. Willie saw that she was finding an exclusively domestic 
life rather tedious, and at Christmas 1976 bought her a copy of Bill Nicolaisen’s 
Place-names of Scotland, just published. She was enthralled.
For the rest of her life place-names were, as she put it, ‘an endless source of fun, 
inspiration, enthusiasm and intellectual excitement.’ Soon afterwards she signed up 
for evening classes with Ian Fraser from the Scottish Place-name Survey. In 1980 
she got a Faculty of Arts scholarship at Edinburgh University to do a PhD with 
him, studying names in Caithness. 
At the same time she joined the Scottish Society for Northern Studies, whose 
activities were also based in George Square. It was a lifetime association. She enjoyed 
the informal and interdisciplinary atmosphere of the Society and made fast friends 
there. From 1985–89 she was editor of its journal Northern Studies, from 1987–89 
Brian Smith2
The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 9, 2015, 1–4
its secretary, became president for three years in the early nineties, and sat on its 
committee until 2000. 
And she was making friends further afield. In October 1980 she met Gunnel 
Melchers, a philologist from Sweden, when Gunnel gave an informal lecture in the 
university. They became lifelong friends. 
A year later she was introduced to the names-scholar Gillian Fellows-Jensen at 
the bicentenary conference of the National Museum of Antiquities. It was another 
firm and long-lasting friendship. Gillian spent a week with Doreen and Willie 
last month and reports that she was as hospitable and kind as always, despite the 
medical treatment she was by then receiving.
Doreen successfully submitted her thesis at Easter 1985. (Gillian was her 
external examiner.) By that time she was teaching again, this time at the Mary 
Erskine School in Edinburgh, where she became a member of senior management. 
She continued to work there until she retired and was by all accounts a good 
administrator and efficient handler of her pupils.
But her deepest interest was always in name studies. During the 1980s she 
published several papers based on her Caithness material. Later she extended her 
interests further afield: to Strathnaver, to Dumfries and Galloway, to Orkney, 
and eventually to her beloved Shetland. But she continued to have a soft spot for 
Caithness, and on the eve of her illness she was planning a major dictionary of 
names there, inspired by work that Diana Whaley had done in the Lake District, 
and by Simon Taylor’s encyclopedic studies of Fife.
Doreen never wrote at book-length. She preferred the close focus of a journal 
article. Readers of this or that paper may not spot it, but she was gradually working 
out an original approach to name studies. 
As a student, nervously giving a paper to a conference of the then Council for 
Name Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, a remark by Margaret Gelling made 
her realise that she hadn’t been using insights provided by her oral informants in a 
subtle enough way. 
She reminisced later that she had been using those insights ‘rather mechanically’, 
and that she was ‘squirrelling away [the] information … without stopping to think 
more deeply about the nature of [the informants’] contribution to place-name 
studies …’ She began to realise, at that early date, that the informants often knew 
more about the landscape and its nomenclature than the scholars.
Onomasticians sometimes concentrate on settlement-names, because they 
are ‘hierarchical’, and because some of them exhibit higher ‘status’ than others. 
Doreen wrote about settlements, as we shall see in a moment, but she had a more 
complex view of them. As she remarked at a conference in 2011, ‘All place-names 
are “important”!’
She was very interested in topographical names. In the first decade of the new 
Doreen Waugh 1944–2015 3
The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 9, 2015, 1–4
century she began to write about places called ‘ness’ and ‘aith’. She didn’t see them 
as mere geographical features, as ‘solely topographical’. She thought that the ‘aiths’ – 
isthmuses – had ‘much to tell us about patterns of movement of goods and people’ 
– what she called the ‘economic landscape’.
She worked through these ideas in papers about Shetland, some of her best. 
In 1993, the final year of her presidency of the Society for Northern Studies, she 
convened a conference in Lerwick. It celebrated the Society’s 25th anniversary and 
the centenary of Jakob Jakobsen’s arrival in Shetland to study the defunct Norn 
language.
Her own lecture there was about Sand, the place where she had spent her 
childhood. Using material collected from local people and documents, she created 
a nuanced and humane account. ‘I think what I … find so fascinating about many 
of the place-names,’ she told her audience, ‘… is the fact that they are so obviously 
living entities and should not merely be revered as icons of the dead Norn language.’
Ten years later, at another Lerwick conference, she spoke about Twatt in 
Aithsting, her mother’s birthplace. She painted a striking ‘toponymic picture’ of 
the district, using material and anecdotes provided by my old schoolmate Jim 
Johnston, and others.
Doreen didn’t just interpret names: she promoted the discipline. She edited the 
proceedings of the Lerwick conferences, and those of another, at Kirkwall in 1999. 
The results, Northern Links (1996), Faces of Orkney (2003) and Cultural Contacts 
in the North Atlantic Region, jointly produced with Peder Gammeltoft and Carole 
Hough (2005) are important primers.
Her energy was boundless. She became an active member of the Scottish Place-
name Society, from its inception in 1996 until March 2012. At various times she 
was its vice-convener, secretary and convener. 
And [in 1998] it was she who came forward with the idea of a Shetland Place 
Names Project [which started] in 2001. She convinced Shetland Amenity Trust 
that it was a feasible project, assisted with the project plan, helped Eileen Brooke-
Freeman, the project officer, from the outset, and made the Scottish Place-Name 
Database, a powerful tool, available to it.
She attended and spoke at more conferences, from Flottemanville-Hague to 
Kárášjohka. After her retirement, in 2004, she planned to be even more active. She 
took on the treasurership of the Society for Northern Studies. Along with her old 
teacher Ian Fraser she organised the 17th annual Study Conference of Society for 
Name Studies in Britain and Ireland. She and Willie had moved from Edinburgh 
to Howgate, near Penicuik, and built a house at Sand. 
Then, as I have said, illness struck. But amidst her treatment, sometimes 
punishing, she refused to give up her activities and interests. She and some colleagues 
organised the publication of a fat book of essays by her old mentor Bill Nicolaisen, 
Brian Smith4
The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 9, 2015, 1–4
In the Beginning was the Name (2011). She received an honorary research fellowship 
at the University of the Highlands and Islands’s Centre for Nordic Studies. With 
Val Turner and Olwyn Owen she became editor of the 2013 Viking Congress 
proceedings (due out next year).
She joined the committee of Shetland ForWirds, and one of her last projects 
was to lead the group that created the popular little book Mirds o Wirds: a Shetland 
Dialect Word Book, which came out last June. I and others have pleasant memories 
of the speech she made, in her strong Shetland voice, at the launch of it. ‘What a 
privilege and strength it is to be bi-dialectal,’ Doreen once said, ‘which is what we 
dialect speakers in Shetland are.’ 
She was a scholar – not a desiccated one. I have been looking through old emails 
and relishing once again our discussions about books. Doreen was quite capable 
of introducing T. S. Eliot or Philip Larkin into a lecture about Shetland names. I 
remember, too, her irrepressible laugh and her hospitality. Doreen Waugh was a 
fine teacher. Many friends, far and wide, will mourn her passing.
Brian Smith
Doreen Waugh (right) and her friend Gunnel Melchers at the launch of 
Mirds o Wirds in Islesburgh House, on 9 June 2014.
Ph
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 B
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Sm
ith


Doreen Waugh 1944-2015

Waugh, William

Brooke-Freeman, Eileen

Taylor, Simon

Doreen J. Waugh: a bibliography

Williamson, Eila

‘hence the name’: : Berwickshire parishes along the Anglo-Scottish Border as described in the Ordnance Survey Name Books

Not a member yet

The Future of the Journal

Carsphairn and Dalmellington Re-visited

Notes on Contributors

A Grammar of Manx Place-names

Terry Kinder, ed.: Life on the Edge. The Cistercian Abbey of Balmerino, Fife (Scotland)

Place-names and Managed Woods in Medieval Scotland

Notes on Contributors

Doreen Waugh 1944-2015

Doreen J. Waugh: a bibliography

‘hence the name’: : Berwickshire parishes along the Anglo-Scottish Border as described in the Ordnance Survey Name Books

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