Talk:Battle of Aldy Charrish

Location

Although the RCAHMS puts this at the mouth of the Wester Ross Strathcarron, I can't help feeling that it would make more sense for the Mackays and Rosses to be fighting on the banks of the Sutherland Carron. The fact that RCAHMS only define the map reference to within a grid square suggests that they're pretty vague about it, other sources say "location unknown". I've seen a tantalising reference to an Allt Charrais near Rosehall, which would make a bit more sense as part of the Kyle of Sutherland watershed, at least. But I can't see anything on a quick skim of the OS map around the top end of the Kyle. So I've gone with the RCAHMS location as the only WP:V source we're likely to get, but my gut feeling says it's probably wrong. :-) Le Deluge (talk) 13:02, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

I've dropped RCAHMS an email, but having seen their Strath Oykel page, I'm fairly happy that we're looking at somewhere around the head of the Kyle, with grid reference NH4897 as favourite. I've started a new section to cover this as the sources are all over the shop in this respect, and I'm not entirely sure whether we might even be looking at two separate battles, but I think that's just the RCAHMS being a bit useless. :-) Le Deluge (talk) 17:22, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

article title is unforgiveable

It's perverse to call this article "Battle of Aldy Charrish", a name that is horribly mangled, and never existed. It actually obscures rather than enlightens.

It's like titling the Battle of Gettysburg "The Battle of Ovget Izberg". There is no place that was ever known as "Aldy Charrish" It's an anachronistic choice of a vague phonetic attempt to represent a Gaelic name - an attempt made by one non-Gaelic speaker, in the days when there was no notion of standard spelling in the English language either.

No wonder this entry has given rise to a spoof wiki page. http://www.wikipeetia.org/Batle_of_Aldi_Charish. What is less forgiveable is that this gruesome clanger has already spawned its derivatives across the internet in various "interesting fact" AND IN GENEAOLOGY SITES.

You know what comes next, don't you? If clueless wiki readers have not already got onto Google maps and splurged "Aldy Charrish" labels over northern Scotland yet, it's only a matter of time.

Allt / ault is a very, very common feature of scottish placenames, meaning a burn (i.e. small watercourse, a creek or stream). The "a' / na" part is the genitive case. This is really not hard to find out, even if you don't speak a word of Gaelic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.55.75.219 (talk) 16:02, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

I think the page will have to be named by whatever the location of the battle is called in the sources for the battle itself. Gordon (c.1630) calls it "Aldicharrish".QuintusPetillius (talk) 16:07, 20 October 2015 (UTC)