Veromo and Rumabo

Identification: Veromo = river Almond in Perthshire; Rumabo = river Almond in Midlothian

Both of these river-names are compounds in the river-letters r and m. The initial V of Veromo will be the river-letter b changed to v. The bo of Rumabo is likely to be just a name-ending. The hill-letters corresponding to the river-letters r and m are m and n, so it seems quite clear that the element mond of modern Cramond is a land-name element referring to a location on the top of raised ground (nd = hill summit), this possibly referring to the location of the Antonine fort on the flat ground where Cramond kirk now stands, at the top of the slope leading down to the river. But it is much more likely that Mond was the name of the hillfort on Craigie hill, on the north side of the river Almond at a point just north of Edinburgh airport. The Flavian fort Rumabo will have taken its name from the river and was most probably at Cramond, though no trace of that fort has yet been found. At some point the hillfort was taken over by people who used the hill-letter l and the name of the hillfort became Lamond or Almond. When the Romans later built their Antonine fort at Cramond they simply transferred the name and presumably the inhabitants of the hillfort to Cramond. At a later date they transferred the name of the fort to the river, which is why the river now has a land-name (a name comprising one or more hill-letters). The raised ground in the case of the Veromo may have been that on which the fort called Bertha stood, since the Fendoch fort is believed to have been occupied only in the Flavian period (which is when the name of the river, Veromo, was transferred to the Roman fort at Fendoch). It is of course also possible that the raised ground at Bertha was only called mon or mond, this then being transferred by the Romans to the river, and that at a later date the river-name was ‘improved’ to Almond by people who were familiar with the Midlothian river of the same name. Nonetheless it is much more likely that the place with a name including the element mon or mond was in fact the hillfort (NGR: NO 069 261) at the top of the escarpment on the north bank of the Almond at a point a little to the south of Pitcairngreen.

[This page was last modified on 11 June 2020]

 [NB. Detailed information as to the different river-letters and as to how they were combined to form compound river-names, together with information as to the four categories of Celtic river-names, is given in Chapter 19: the rivers of Roman Britain. Detailed information as to the different hill-letters is given in Chapter 1 and information as to how the hill-letters were combined to form compound place-names is given in Chapter 2]

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