Ashmabee
Ashmabee # AMY S NO2212 3
Ashmabee 1788 Sasines no. 1893 [‘... part of Leckiebank called Ashmabee’]
Ashingbie 1810 Sasines no. 8697 [‘... town and lands of Leckiebank, properly so called; lands called Sibbalds Knows and Ashingbie’]
Ashmabee 1817 Sasines no. 11734 [part of lands of Crosshills AMY, q.v.]
Ashmabee 1818 Sasines no. 12006 [‘Ashmabee, Inshumee and Inshumee Butts’]
? + ? ON bý(r)
Amongst the ten occurrences of this name in the late eighteenth- and early ninteenth-century Sasines, five appear as Ashmabee and five as Ashingbee. Since the name has not survived,[42] it is impossible to decide which form is correct, and which the result of scribal error. All forms agree, however, that the final element is -bie/-bee, which may represent ON bý(r) ‘farm’, thus linking it to the select band of those Fife names coined by ON-speakers. The nearest such name is Weddersbie CLS (below), only a few km to the east in the neighbouring parish, and in a similar position on the south-east slopes of the Ochils. However, the fact that Ashmabee appears so late in the record, in relatively garbled form, and (to date) in only one source, means that any conclusions about its origin must remain very tentative (see also my brief discussion in Taylor 1995a, 157, footnote 21).
This place-name appeared in printed volume 4