Route de Roi as the root of Rottenrow, the ancient Glasgow street name (T McIver, Letters, September 21), alas fails several tests
Historically, new towns may boast a King's Road but ancient ones usually require a king or king's palace around. At one time Glasgow may be the Holy City but, unlike the City of David, it was never a royal city. No king of Scots ever had a palace there. Before them, kings of Strathclyde from Coroticus (c415-?) to Ywain the Bald (d 1018) are generally associated with Dumbarton. This applies to other ''royal road'' theories, contrived to overcome linguistic objections (eg, Route en Roi or the Gaelic Rathad an Righ).
Linguistically, T McIver gets full marks on metrical pattern and count of syllables (ignoring the terminal ''e'' in ''Route''). On other measures it has an above-average score on consonant pattern (21/2 out of 4), but is lousy on the vowel sounds (0/3).
When we turn to broader ''cultural linguistics'', the only pronunciations we know for certain are the modern English and the colloquial Scots ''Rattan Raw''. Make the ''tt'' in ''Rattan'' a Glesca glottal stop and you have a pretty good approximation to Rathan Ro, Gaelic for ''earthen ring-fort path''. It is too much to burden the Norman French, to whom we owe the finest cathedral in Scotland, also with Route de Roi (but sans roi) that evolved, somehow, into ''Rattan Raw''.
Most expositors of Rottenrow are too much like exegetes and fail to ask the question: are there similar names elsewhere? Walkers familiar with the Clyde near Uddingston know of a tributary with a puzzling name: the Rotten Calder. Upstream this divides into two burns, each named after its confluent component.
Close by, on Ordnance Survey Landranger for Glasgow (NS650527), in the Olde English script for ancient but non-Roman ruins is the word ''motte'' and the symbol for earthworks. Who can resist the conclusion that here are the remains of an ancient rathan and the Rotten Burn, later Anglicised, is named after it?
On a wider canvass still there are, among others, Rathenrawe in Co. Antrim, Ratten Row in Cumbria and Rathenraw (local variant Ratten Row) in Lancashire. If we ask what these places have in common with Old Glasgow then the answer will not, I fear, take us down the King's Road.
I hope T McIver is not dispirited by this. His (or her) effort has a long and honourable pedigree. A Gaelic variant beguiled even the late Jack House and the number of things he got wrong about Glasgow can be counted on the fingers of one thumb.
Thomas McLaughlin,
4 Munro Road,
Glasgow.
Letters on hospital cuts - Page 8
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