The Mount

The Mount MML S NO339163 1 362 120m SOF

    <Lie Munth> c.1290 Scrymgeour Inventory no. 667 [16th c. copy; printed ‘the landis of Kilmukis callit Woddislat and Hillokfield’ dated 5 Jan. 1541 (=1542)]
    Lie Mu<n>th c.1290 Scrymgeour Inventory no. 782 [printed Liemuth; lands of The Mount called *Woodflat (Woddislak) and Lilac(field) (Lillokfeild) MML]
    le Month 1293 SHS Highland Papers 2 no. 3, p. 126 [Thomas of Kilmaron]
    dimedietatem terrarum de le Month 1524 x 1538 RMS iii no. 1781 [‘half of lands of the Mount’ in the lordship of Pitbladdo CUP, q.v.]
    Month 1538 St A. Rent. [in parish of Monimail (Monymeill)]
    Month 1590 x 1599 Pont MS 54B
    Munth 1654 Blaeu (Pont) East Fife
    Mount 1654 Blaeu (Gordon) Fife
    de terris de Mounth 1679 Retours (Fife) no. 1596 [Patrick Hay, annual rent of 240 merks ‘from lands of Mount’, in parish of Monimail (Monemaill)]
    the Mount 1723 Geog. Coll. i, 304
    Mount Leloch 1750s Roy
    Mount 1775 Ainslie/Fife
    Mount 1855 OS 6 inch 1st edn

G monadh

‘Hill, upland grazing’; monadh probably originally referred to the prominent stretch of upland consisting of Lindifferon Hill and Mount Hill. At the highest point of this upland (221m) is the Hopetoun Monument, built in the form of a giant Doric column in 1826, in memory of Sir John Hope of Over Rankeillour, who successfully assumed command in the Peninsular War after the death of Sir John Moore at Corunna in 1809 (Pride 1990, 105).

    The definite article is shown in the earliest record of the name, and has probably been so persistent because of its re-analysis as the (cognate) Scots appellative or common noun mount.

    The farm of The Mount, from which the famous sixteenth-century Scottish playwright Sir David Lindsay of the Mount derives his epithet, lies high up on the south-eastern slope of this upland.

    In 1315 ‘the island of Inchecostin’ is recorded as lying ‘in the tenement of the Mount pertaining to the land of’ Parbroath, one of the lands granted to John Ogilvie by William of Kinloch (Swinton 1905, 173; see Parbroath CRC for more details). The island presumably translates Latin insula, here referring to low-lying land beside the Fernie Burn or its tributary, and echoes the first element of the name Inchecostin, G innis, with the same meaning.

    Locally /ðəˈmʌnt/;[335] however, /ðəˈməunt/ is now frequently heard.

This place-name appeared in printed volume 4