welcome

Water-courses

'If the names of the larger and more important water-courses are the most durable
of all types of place-names and if, further, the fertile valleys of the larger rivers are
likely to have been settled first, whereas the tributaries and smaller streams,
especially in hilly and mountainous country, might have seen permanent human
settlement only centuries, or perhaps even thousands of years, later, it would
appear to follow that the names of the larger rivers should go back to the earlier
stratum of settlement and therefore also to the earliest language spoken, whereas
the tributaries and smallest burns would preserve evidence of later lingustic
invasions' W.F H. Nicolaisen, Scottish Place-Names