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Gaelic and Welsh names, not infrequent in Cumberland,
are more frequent north of Solway, and show
that the settlement did not drive out the earlier
population : there is no area so exclusively Scandinavian
as to suggest that a clearance was made by
forcible invasion ; but the Norse names are, as usual,
thicker on the coast, and fade away thence inland.
The name of the Solway itself can hardly be from
that of the Selgovae who inhabited Galloway in
Roman times ; the termination is surely the Norse
vágr, a creek, and the characteristic of this estuary is
its tidal bore ; whence one is tempted to connect it
with soll, "swill," and solmr, "the swell of the sea."
The stone carvings of Dumfriesshire, so far as they
can be judged from Mr. Romilly Allen’s great volume
on the Early Christian Monuments of Scotland,
seem to be wholly of pre-Viking period. There are
splendid works of the Anglian church at Ruthwell,
Hoddam, Thornhill, Closeburn and elsewhere. The
absence of relics of the Viking Age may perhaps be
explained by their presence in the neighbourhood
of Whithorn. We find, for example, an interesting
series at Whithorn itself showing an evident transition
from Anglian work to debased floral scrolls, hammerhead
crosses, broken ring-plaits and ruder cutting,
characteristic of the Viking period in Cumberland
and Yorkshire. At Aspatria in Cumberland is a curious
incised slab with the Norse Swastika ; this is paralleled
by a slab from Craignarget on Luce Bay, and the
hammerhead slab with rude crucifix and barbarous
scroll-work from Kirkcolm on Loch Ryan resembles the
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