A note on the place names maps

Peter Drake, 2026

We acquired copies of the maps for the community hall following a conversation about the old hall becoming a Piping School at which Alasdair Fraser was present. Davy Garrett who started the piping school project said he was hoping to create an archive of west coast tunes housed in the school in order to preserve the tunes for the future. I thought this was a good idea and compared it to the loss of gaelic place names which were becoming less well known as the number of gaelic speakers in the community declined. When I suggested that someone should try and record the place names before they were lost Alasdair said 'Ach that's already been done' and went on to say they were under his bed. As I was chair of the committee planning our new community hall at the time I asked if he might consider letting us have copies of the maps if I would guarantee a place to display them in the new building. Alasdair subsequently copied the maps and had them mounted as a gift to the hall and supplied the index and translations to accompany them. As far as I am aware the originals are now in Australia.

The Coigach Gaelic Place Names CD

Ian Campbell Whittle, 2002

Forty years ago Donnie Fraser of Raon Mor began collecting all the Gaelic place and feature names of his native village, Achiltibuie, and those of the surrounding area of Coigach in Wester Ross.

Almost at the northernmost edge of the Gaeltacht, Coigach lies in the country of the MacLeod's of Assynt and, because until the time Donnie started his collecting, it was accessible only from the sea, it had preserved and still preserves a great deal of its Gaelic.

Donnie compiled his lists but died before he could map them. His nephew, Alasdair, on retiring to Raon Mor, took up the work and continued, with more input from the two Ali MacLeods of Achnahaird, 'West' and 'Beag’, locating and mapping the almost two thousand names. The maps and the accompanying book are displayed in our village hall. However, Alasdair and local enthusiasts decided to use modern techniques to create a CD of the project - the Coigach Gaelic Place Names CD. From the large maps was created a series of smaller, interlinking, clickable maps connecting the names to their locations and vice versa, backed by local music all contained on a hybrid disk that can be used on any PC or Mac.

The project from its beginning with Donnie Fraser in the 1960s was unique. It remains unique in its CD form that was completed last month and is already being used by local schools as a geography, history and Gaelic language resource.

The Coigach Gaelic Place Names CD is a community project. It is for sale at £7.99 directly from us or on the Net. All profits go to the Coigach Good Fund, to be used for helping local people and projects. [Here Ian provides a web link, now defunct. GW]

The Coigach Gaelic Place Names CD is the first of a Coigach series that will be made available over the next few weeks. The others will be of singers and musicians, past and present, who are or were local or had or have local connections. First in the series will be Alasdair Fraser - Raon Mor. He is also the uncle of the present Alasdair Fraser and was a fine Gaelic singer on the radio in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1953 he sat down to record on tape his repertoire. The tape has been handed down and once again modern computer techniques have allowed it to be cleaned and re-mastered to produce a wonderful record of a fine Gaelic voice.

If you would like more details of these and other Coigach recordings, simply let me know and I will let you know when they are available. If you would like more details of Coigach Place Names or have anyone else in mind who might be interested in it or Coigach music, again do not hesitate to contact me.

Ian Campbell Whittle

Originally published in Scottish Place Names News, issue 13, Autumn 2002
Read the full paper here. The CD contents are downloadable from here. Please make a donation.

Coigach Gaelic Place Names Online

Graeme Walker, 2026

I moved to Achduart, Coigach in 2024. My grandmother [Dolina Smethers nee. Fraser] was born at 106 Achiltibuie and we spent most summers in 111, so it felt like coming home. Donnie Fraser was my grandmother’s first cousin, therefore my second cousin twice removed. And his nephew Alasdair was mum’s second cousin, therefore my second cousin once removed.

I was born in 1980 so might have met Donnie who died in 1987, but Alasdair do I remember. He took us out once in a small boat with a faulty outboard to spin around Isle Ristol and thereabouts, probably in the early 90’s sometime. I was so shocked when the outboard cut out and Alasdair reached for the oars that I dropped my socks overboard (I’d taken them off earlier for a swim). By the time the boat was turned around, the socks were gone. He also poured me a huge dram when I was about 10 when we visited him at Raon Mor.

For quite some years I’d noticed the maps in Coigach Hall and grew increasingly fascinated with them. It took me a while to figure out that the numbers matched up with references in some folders, normally kept out of sight. Naturally, once I understood how they worked I began trying to match up the names with names I’d heard as a boy such as Cat Rock [Achiltibuie 64 Creagan a’chait]. I began to think that I might be able to make an online version of the map, to make it easier to research names and find out what places were called and meant both in English and Gaelic and so started asking around. My 2nd cousin once removed Iain Muir provided the solution - the above mentioned CD.

Here’s the introduction from it:

“This disk is a digital version of the maps and text prepared by Alasdair Fraser. It consists of a series of linked clickable maps and individual place-names with translations and explanations.

The maps start with the overall view of the Coigach Peninsula above, which then clicks to a larger scale version of the same map which is again clickable and opens to still larger scale local maps with the Gaelic place-names. Each place-name is clickable and will lead you to a translation and explanation. Each large scale local map can also be accessed directly by clicking its name in the text which appears when the sequence is started. To avoid congestion the map scales vary and, in some busy parts, numbers only are shown, but resting the pointer on the number for a moment will bring up its name nearby.”

Now it is 2026 and I’m finally starting the process of taking each entry from the maps and CD and uploading them to Umap, which uses Open Street Maps (OSM) as its base layer. This is then embedded on a page on my website, which isn’t perfect and indeed it may find its own home at some point in the future.

OSM itself doesn’t have either satellite view or an OS base layer which has made it difficult to confirm precise locations, not least because none of the sources have gps coordinates. I have taken to editing OSM directly, adding details which I hope will help me position named places correctly. However, readers of this online project can assist me greatly by visiting place names that have yet to be confirmed and providing me with gps coordinates, which I can then use to update the online place names. Details below.

GPS Assistance

I acknowledge that more precision would be beneficial for this project, especially where the place name refer to small objects and/or very precise locations such as rocks and waterfalls. An asterisk (*) denotes where I have confirmed the precise location of the place with GPS. Readers will note that even though they are no longer needed, I have kept the original numbers for each place name entry, which makes it easier for cross referencing with the original sources. The entire CD can be downloaded here [341mb]. It’s definitely dated, but invaluable for cross-referencing as the place name markers are positioned over an OS map. It also has lots of photos and other references I haven’t necessarily included in the online version.

Readers of this web page are encouraged to choose locations that are unconfirmed [with an asterisk] and send me the place name and precise gps coordinates using the below form, in the following example format:

Name: 77. Clach an eorna GPS: 57.97221864171678 -5.254597663879395

You can use this tool, or similar to convert Google Maps and other coordinates to full decimal coordinates, which are what I need for Umap entries. Or just over what you have and I’ll do it.

Contact Form

As well as providing GPS coordinates, you can also use the below form to tell me about errors and ommisions and to suggest both new Gaelic place names in Coigach and to let me know about old names that have yet to be recorded.