Reginald of Durham in his Life of St. Cuthbert records that on the saint’s feast-day in 1164 the saintly abbot, Ailred of Rievaulx, was present at the ancient church which at that time was known as S. Cuthbert de Desnesmor (the latter being one of the divisions of Galloway). Early records of the name in vernacular form include Kirkcudbriht in 1210, Kirkcuthbright 1296, Kirkcupbrich 1458, Kirkcubright on Blaeu’s map 1654 (based on Pont c1590).
Kirkcudbright is undoubtedly ‘Cuthbert’s church’. Born c635, Saint Cuthbert began his monastic life at Melrose but in time became Abbot and Bishop of Lindisfarne, the earliest, and always among the leading, religious houses in northern Northumbria. He is known to have visited Carlisle in 685, a time when the influence and territorial holdings of the Northumbrian kings and of Lindisfarne were extending westwards into the Solway region, though there is no good reason to suppose he himself visited Kirkcudbright or founded the church here. It is however possible that Lindisfarne acquired land here, and established a church and monastic community, as Northumbrian rule extended along the northern coastline of the Solway from the late seventh century onward. It may be significant that Kirkcudbright, with its likely association with Lindisfarne, is close to Kirkandrews, which may well have been associated with Lindisfarne’s rival, Hexham, dedicated to St. Andrew.
In the third quarter of the ninth century, following the fall of York to the Danes and under continual threat from Viking raids, the community of St Cuthbert departed from Lindisfarne, carrying his relics and other treasures. Accounts of their long exodus make mention of their travelling at one stage (probably early in the 880s) to the Irish Sea coast, maybe with the intention of crossing to Ireland, but whatever their plan was, it evidently changed. The foundation of the church at Kirkcudbright has sometimes been associated with this movement. Certainly a church dedicated to Cuthbert would have housed some relic of the saint, but if the wandering community did stay here, it was probably because a church associated with their patron already existed.
Archaeologically, the presence of a fragment of a Northumbrian-style stone cross-head, as well as a ‘Viking’ sword in a burial, imply that there was a church and burial ground on the site of the present cemetery by the tenth century. The cult of St Cuthbert continued to be promoted, especially from the late eleventh century onward by the Prince-Bishops of Durham, where his relics finally found their resting-place. As mentioned above, in 1164 the saint’s feast-day was observed at S. Cuthbert de Desnesmor.
Dedications to St Cuthbert of three churches in Carrick in Ayrshire (Maybole, Dailly and Ballantrae), suggest that the cult of the saint was also favoured in that region; Ballantrae was earlier known as Kirkcudbrycht Innertig (1545 and later), the old church was marked as Old Kirkcudbright on the 1st edition OS map (Innertig is the confluence of the Tig Water with the R. Stinchar). There is a Kirkcudbright Hill, Kirkcubre in 1511, in Glencairn parish in Dumfriesshire, implying the presence of church or chapel of St Cuthbert there too.
Although the origin of the name is transparent, the name is an interesting one for place-name scholars, being one of several place-names in Galloway, Dumfriesshire and Cumberland, many of them parish-names, with ‘Kirk-‘ as the first element and the name of a saint as the second (there are at least a dozen in the Stewartry). ‘Kirk’ is of course the Anglo-Scandinavian word, from Old Norse kirkja, that passed into Scots and northern English as the usual word for a church (both Old English cirice and Old Norse kirkja go back ultimately to Greek kyriakon ‘house of the Lord’). Consequently, these names have often been assumed to be English, Scots, or possibly Norse, in origin.
But there is a problem: the order of the elements is Celtic, names in any of those Germanic-family languages regularly have the generic element in second position, the qualifying element first – so why is not *Cuthbertskirk? There has been much debate about this question among place-name scholars, but the view currently accepted by most is based on extensive study of name-formation in comparable bilingual situations, which shows that the best clue to the language in which a name was formed is not the origin of the individual elements but the structure of the name. So, although it is formed with an Anglo-Norse word and the name of a major figure of the ‘Anglian’ church, Kirkcudbright was probably in origin a Celtic formation. Names like Kirkcudbright were most likely given by Gaelic speakers, many of them probably bilingual in Gaelic and either Norse, Northumbrian English or Older Scots, who had adopted kirk, in preference to the more general cill, as their word for a church, perhaps specifically for an important church, such that may well have become a parish church as the parochial system developed, mainly through the twelfth century.
While the townsfolk have maintained a spelling that reflects an early Scots form of the name, the pronunciation, ‘Kirkcoobry’, preserves that of later Gaelic, transmitted via Scots and English speakers through at least three centuries.
Regrettably, to this day, an entirely insupportable alternative etymology is quite often recycled, even in supposedly authoritative publications, namely *Caer-cuabrit, supposedly meaning ‘fort on the river-bend’. Although it this is usually referred to as ‘Gaelic’, the Victorian antiquarians who first floated this notion did not describe it as such: both Malcolm McLaren Harper, ‘Rambles in Galloway’ 1876, and (copying him more or less verbatim), Rev. George Ogilvie Elder ‘Kirkcudbright: Story of an Ancient Royal Burgh’ 1895, both simply labelled it ‘Celtic’ and attributed it to the Britons inhabiting the place in the time of the Roman Empire. By 1895, Francis Groome in his ‘Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland’ had rightly signalled it as mere speculation with ‘some have claimed’, yet it still continues to be trotted out as if it were established fact.
In fact, while caer is a modern Welsh word for ‘a fort’, if the word had been current in the Brittonic language in the early first millennium A.D., it would have been either *cagra or *cadra (the latter would have been a borrowing from late Latin quadra). But more fundamentally, no such word as cuabrit ‘river-bend’ exists, or ever has existed, in any Celtic language. Indeed, following now well-established understanding of the phonetic developments in those languages, no word in that form ever could have existed in any of them (if ‘caer cuabrit’ ever had appeared in an Old Irish or Old Welsh document, it would have been pronounced, roughly, ‘kyre gwavrid’; cwafriad in modern Welsh is ‘a quavering sound, a trill’ (but that’s a borrowing from English). But, having now the comprehensive historical dictionaries and surveys of place-names, most of them digitised and readily searchable, which the Victorian antiquaries would have marvelled at with envy, it is possible to confirm that no word with even remotely similar sound and meaning can be found. Where McLaren got it from, I have been quite unable to trace, but it can certainly be dismissed as having any relevance to the etymology of Kirkcudbright.
Alan James September 2019