Yellow Well

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 18 Jul 2022

I always have high hopes when setting out to find a named well. One day I will surely achieve my goal and stumble across some forgotten old stone fairy-tale structure, with half a mile of rope wrapped round a spindle with a large wooden pail attached, rocking slightly in the breeze. This is a start at least, however, because I have rarely found any evidence of a well at all on previous occasions. I'm sure it was far prettier once upon a time though. The first OS map gave it it's Gaelic name: Tobar Bhuidhe. Having done a bit of hillwalking in Scotland I know a few of the colour names. Gaelic place-names are extremely prosaic on the whole (I have my own theory that even when they were not, somebody somewhere has tried to change them into matter-of-fact descriptive ones, as some seem a little OTT when you read the translations!) and colours feature a lot. So 'Bhuidhe' being yellow, 'Tobar' must be well. I had thought that this name would be a good example to demonstrate that in Gaelic the adjective follows the noun. Whilst this is normally the case - as here - it turns out that colours make up some of the exceptional adjectives that can appear both before and after a noun. Nouns in Gaelic are either masculine and feminine as in many other European languages, but to complicate things further in this poorly-chosen example, it also turns out that in some parts of Scotland 'tobar' is masculine and in others feminine. Here, it is feminine. This can be figured out because of the first "h' in 'Bhuidhe'. Adjectives in Gaelic usually change according to the gender of the noun; the masculine yellow is 'buidhe'. This adding of an h to the first letter of a word to denote femininity, is called 'leniting' (pronounced lee-night-ing) and also changes the pronunciation of the letter. In this case the "b' becomes a 'v', although I imagine the distinction is a bit more subtle for native speakers. The easy way to remember it is to think of the Irish first name 'Siobhan', Irish and Scottish Gaelic being closely linked.

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