The Name
The name Blairgowrie means "Plain of Gowrie" in Scottish Gaelic, in which language it is spelt Blàr Ghobharaidh or Blàr Ghobhraidh. The name Rattray is Raitear in Gaelic, and may derive from an English language cognate of Gaelic ràth meaning "fortress" plus a Pictish term cognate with Welsh tref meaning "settlement".
Unusually – given its location – the town features bilingual street signs (in English and Gaelic). This feature dates back to 1996, when a local campaign persuaded An Comunn Gàidhealach to hold the National Mod in the town despite its location in the Lowlands area of the country. The bilingual signs were part of this campaign.
Read more about this topic: Blairgowrie And Rattray
Famous quotes containing the words the name, the and/or name:
“The name of the town isn’t important. It’s the one that’s just twenty-eight minutes from the big city. Twenty-three if you catch the morning express. It’s on a river and it’s got houses and stores and churches. And a main street. Nothing fancy like Broadway or Market, just plain Broadway. Drug, dry good, shoes. Those horrible little chain stores that breed like rabbits.”
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore than name. Are they all alike. I think so.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)