Sometimes in one’s daily trawling of the estate agents’ listings for funky carpets and bath suites, you come across an unusual street that name you don’t recognise. Auchingane was one such name for me.
Auch– place names are nearly always from Gaelic and Auchen or Auchin are nearly always from Achadh, or field. The only other Edinburgh Auch– placename is Auchinleck’s Brae (and by extension, Court) in Newhaven, named for a former landowner; Auchinleck being a village in Ayrshire with a Gaelic name – Achadh an Leac, “Field of Flat Stones”.
There are a few more Auchs in Midlothian, e.g. Auchendinny and Auchencorth by Penicuik, and there’s Auchinoon Hill in West Lothian – all with Achadh/field derivations; Fields of height or fortress; of a standing stone; and of wool, respectively.
Back to Auchingane, it’s an unusual and rather obscure one. It’s recorded as early as 1554 as a portion of land, joined with Dreghorn in 1606. The original place may have been in the vicinity of what William Roy curiously calls Showerhole on his 1750 Lowland Map
The likely derivation of Auchingane is Achadh nan Gaimhne, Field of Stirks (yearling cows). It was probably therefore a particularly good bit of pasture for such beasts at one time. Beyond the modern streetname, it’s not a place ever included in an OS map for Edinburgh (or even recorded in the OS Name Books of Midlothian that I can find). Someone at Edinburgh District Council (as it was) obviously had a very long memory when they resurrected it in 1985 for a new housing scheme.
Such placenames as these are particularly interesting as they are direct evidence that the Gaelic language was in common enough use in these parts in late Medieval times that it was being used to give names to places. Even in a city and county long dominated by the Scots and then English languages, Gaelic has always been there – and still is – It’s just hiding in plain sight.
There is at least one other Auchingane in Scotland – a farmstead south of Falkirk. It is recorded by Roy as Achindean and by the Ordnance Survey in their name books for Stirlingshire as Auchingane.
However it’s also given in the maps of the OS variously as Auchingeen, Auchingean and Auchengean. The latter seems to be the accepted modern form; an impressive array of spellings for such a small place over only less than 100 years! It is still maintained as Auchingane however in the book of geological place names as it lends itself to one of the coal bearing strata of the Scottish Central coalfield.
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