How to waste time well

In asking "Does law mean, you know, law?", Philip Challinor provided me with a thoroughly enjoyable hour thinking and researching the word origins connected with hills, laws and the volcanic plugs dotting the landcape of the Lothians.

There's lots of laws round here, of this definition

Law, n.2 Also: lawe, lau(e, la. [North. and north midl. ME. lawe (Orm), lau (Cursor M.), midl. low(e, OE. hláw, hl?w
a grave-mound, also, a hill...Espec. one more or less round or conical in shape; often applied to isolated hills

This takes 'law' for hill, back to the 14th C at least, and like the surname Law links this with O.E. hláw. Interestingly, on the west coast of Scotland, hill-laws are more commonly sea-mounts, whereas here in the east the waterbound volcanic plug of Bass Rock sits next door to landbound Berwick and Traprain Laws.

But I'd like to think that hill-laws might be distantly related with legal-laws, through O.N. lagu (to lay down).

Such a derivation or accretion for law is reminiscent of the Icelandic Alþing, which met in a natural ampitheatre at Thingvellir near a fissure where the West European and North American continental plates crunch. Here the meaning meeting, legislation has become concrete as the amorphous English monstrosity of a word thing. It's the legislative meaning of þing that's passed down in our word hustings.


Once you start counting, there are so many local volcanic plugs (Binny Craig, Dechmont Law, the 7 hills of Edinburgh), and each the seat of an ancient settlement- a local concentration of people and power.

Cairnpapple houses a bronze age kist and a couple thousand years of burials as well as the TV transmitter for all of West Lothian, as the highest point in a 15 mile radius. It's guarded by a herd of curious cattle who menace on the approach to the site.


In East Lothian, Traprain (correct spelling- but pronounced by locals as Trappain) houses Loth's Stone (legendary hero for whom Lothians named) and, until the early 20th C, silver tribute from the Votadini to the Romans.


Castle Rock, the classic 'crag-and-tails' volcanic plug, now seats...errr a girt big ugly military garrison.