Argyle

Argyle SSL S NO504165 2

in vico que (sic) dicitur Argayle 1446 SAUL LPW 36 [‘in the street which is called Argyle’]
Argale Wynd 1488 NAS Calendar of Charters ii no. 535
Argail 1513 RMS ii no. 3812
Ergail 1568 St A. Kirk Sess. i, 303
Ardgyle 1642 Gordon MS Fife [inset plan of the town of St Andrews]
Orgyle 1775 Ainslie/Fife [inset plan of the town of St Andrews]
Argyle, Argael or Northgyle 1790s OSA, 705 [‘immediately adjoining to the west port of the South Street is a suburb called Argyle, Argael or Northgyle’]
village of Argyle 1817 Sasines no. 11448 [‘beside St Andrews’]

? en Argyll

This either derives from, or has been assimilated to, the existing territorial name Argyll, G Earra-Ghàidheal, ‘shore, border or region of (the) Gaels’ (the first element is Old and Middle Irish airer), for a discussion of which see Watson 1926, 120–1. It was the opinion of the late Dr Ronald Cant, the well-known Scottish historian and citizen of St Andrews, that the name Argyll may have been applied to a remnant Gaelic-speaking population living outside the burgh precincts (pers. comm.).[254] Described in 1513 as being on the lands of Rathelpie SSL (RMS ii no. 3812), Argyle certainly always lay just outside the St Andrews burgh limits, west of the West Port.

OS Name Book 101, 77 states: ‘Its present name is no doubt a corruption of North or Norgyle by which name it is known in old documents’. But the only evidence for this is the form Northgyle from OSA (quoted in early forms, above).

The name survives in Argyle Street, St Andrews, a westwards continuation of South Street, corresponding to the description given above in the entry for 1790s.

In Dundee the main route from the burgh to the west was called *Argyllsgait, now the Overgate: Ergaydilisgat c.1300 × 1350 Dundee Chrs., p. 23; Ergeylisgat 1331 Dundee Chrs., p. 23; Ergailisgate 1443 Dundee Chrs., p. 21. As William Hay, the editor of Dundee Chrs., points out, this can have nothing to do with the Argyll (i.e. Campbell) family (ibid., p. 23).[255] Perth, too, had a similarly named street: vici Ergilis-gate nuncupat<i> 1528 RMS iii no. 722 [‘of the street called E.’]. Lythe and Butt state that ‘[t]he Argyll Gait or Argyll Street, in later times a familiar feature of the Scottish town, was in the Middle Ages an approach road outside the town proper, marking the place where stranger traders must rest their bales and await the condescension of the burgesses’ (1975, 37).[256]

This place-name appeared in printed volume 3