Miglo
Miglo ~ SLO W NO2410 1
aqu<a> lie Miglo 1605 RMS vi no. 1636 [common pasture in the common muir of Strathmiglo (called) the *Greens (lie Greines) both between the mill lead (Mylne-leid) and ‘the water the Miglo’ and on the south side of the said burn]
Miglo Fl<uvius> 1642 Gordon MS Fife
Miglo fl<uvius> 1654 Blaeu (Gordon) Fife
Miglo F<luvius> 1688 globe of Vincenzo Coronelli,[410] Swiss National Museum, Zürich (Military Dept.) [on this globe the Miglo is the only watercourse named in Scotland][411]
the Water of Miglo 1722 Geog. Coll. i, 295–6 [‘to the N. of Myres there is a water called Barroway which descending from some hills to the N.W. falls in with the Mill burn on the E. side of the house, where is a stonebridge the water runs almost S.E. and falls into the Water of Miglo, /p. 296/ all which fall into Eden a litle on the S. of Kilwhiss in this parish about a mile from the town S.E.’; Mill burn here represents OS Pathf. Auchtermuchty Burn]
Water of Miglo 1790s OSA, 773 [it takes the name Eden when it leaves SLO]
Water of Miglo or Eden 1832 Miller/map
water of Miglo or Eden 1840 Leighton 1840 ii, 198 [provides ‘90 horse power’ to mills in the parish]
Pictish * mig + ?
Though the earliest forms of Miglo as the name of the burn date to the seventeenth century, the name Strathmiglo (q.v. below), which contains the burn-name, has forms from the twelfth century onwards, the earliest being –miggloch (from a seventeenth-century copy), –migeloch, –migeloc, with forms ending in c or k predominating until the fifteenth century, during which they give way to forms ending in an open or closed o. It contains Pictish *mig-, which is closely related to Welsh mign ‘bog, marsh’, and which is found in about six place-names in eastern Scotland between the Forth and south-east Sutherland (see Elements Glossary, PNF 5, for more details; see also Watson 1926, 374–6).[412] The course of the Miglo through its strath or broad valley between the Lomonds to the south and the Ochils to the north is still relatively muddy and prone to flooding, and would have been even more so before the days of drainage and canalisation.
The second element of Miglo is more problematic. It is unclear from the earliest forms of Strathmiglo whether the final consonant was originally a fricative –ch /x/ or a stop –c/k /k/. The fact that the final consonant is lost during the fifteenth century suggests that by this time, at least, it was the former (–ch) rather than the latter (–c/k).
Up until the early nineteenth century Miglo was applied to the main water-course of the parish up to the point where it left the parish. See Eden, PNF 2, Section 1, for more details.
This place-name appeared in printed volume 4