This post is a work in progress. I’ll come back to it when the day job’s less busy. For now, it’s just a copy of this thread from Twitter.
Here are 4 distribution maps of 1822 Gaelic place-names across D&G. The heatmap (1) effectively traces out the region. You can see that the Nith and the Annan (2) are less significant thresholds than the A701 (3). Pic 4 shows the numbers for each element.
The data’s from the Vision of Britain database: visionofbritain.org.uk/data/. Parish shape files from here. I filtered the data by what seemed like the 14 most common Gaelic generic elements in the region.
Obviously there’s a lot missing, but it gives a fair impression. Here are my numbers compared to the new Galloway Glens place-name database:
Balmaclellan 71/100
Balmaghie 21/59
Crossmichael 18/35
Carsphairn 18(!)/128
Dalry 61/143
Girthon 42/0(???)
Kells 69/177
Parton 22/43
dgplacenames 