Well, an interesting turn of events means that we now know exactly what the name of our house means! We ended up meeting the lovey Barbara, at a social event at the village hall, whose uncle actually built the house, and she confirmed for us that Clacheranmor means 'Big Rock'. So, we were very close to the truth, but we can now be confident in our house with its very strong name. Below is the original blog article where we tried to work out the name through trial and error....
And, I joined the local Nordic walking group recently where I met a chap called Graham. We were discussing local walks and I mentioned the Modan's well hill walk. He chuckled and said that he and his brother were once working up there with the forestry, planting trees. His brother found what looked like a muddy spring and started placing pieces of quartz around it. A couple of decades later someone else discovered it and decided it was the ancient Modan's well. I love this local folklore and legend and the thought that archeological records might be based on some boyhood mischief!
Original blog post on Clacheranmor meaning
No one seems sure on what the house name, Clacheranmor, actually means. We asked Adam and Emma, the previous owners, and Heather and Dave, the neighbours. We even spoke to the AGA engineer when he asked us what it meant. John had found what he thought was a solid idea on the internet - 'Big Rock'. I mean, it does have a very large, rocky hill behind it! The AGA man thought the word for rock was something else. So, I (Liz) did a little research online. Google is super helpful (maybe) and it is amazing what you can find on the internet.
There were a few initial, probably false, starts I found such as:
Clach - rock or stone, as previously thought
Mòr - big or important, again, just as John found online, but the O in Clacheranmor doesn't have an accent
Mor - much
Clacher - used as a surname, from Clachair, meaning stone mason. For example Mac a' chlachaire ‘son of the stonemason’. It's an interesting idea
Clacher - according to Urban Dictionary means Scottish slave - not sure this makes any sense, but I'm sure there is a link there somewhere (I'm not down with the kids!)
So, then I tried Google Translate for answers, and it has Scottish Gaelic as an option. However, I knew that the house name was a combination of more than one word because nothing comes up when you type it in as one word. So I tried different combinations and got several different answers. Such as:
Clach er an mor - a stone of the sea
Clach eran mor - a large stone
Clach er anmor - stone of the past
Funny, though, that it doesn't work in reverse as you get a different answer, so when you type the English translations back into Google Translate and convert them back to Gaelic:
For 'a stone of the sea' you get - clach a' chuain
For 'a large stone' you get - clach mhòr
For 'stone of the past' you get - clach an àm a dh'fhalbh
Whatever the answer is it seems to include the word stone in some format. But, I guess we may never know unless we know what the original creators of the house intended, or we find a Gaelic speaker to ask. This might be difficult seeing as almost everyone we have met so far is English or Welsh!
I think both 'a stone of the sea' and 'stone of the past' evoke wonderful and romantic images, but all of the names are equally possible as they all bear some resemblance to the house and it's position in the landscape. So, I don't really mind which it is. We just love it.
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