But this is very far from being the case. Extremely few places with Scandinavian names are to be found in the Scotch Lowlands; and even those few are confined, almost without exception, to the old border land between the Cheviot Hills and the Firths of Clyde and Forth, and to the counties nearest the English border. Dumfriesshire, lying directly north of Cumberland and the Solway Firth, forms the central point of such places. Northumberland and Durham, the two north-easternmost counties of England, contain but a scanty number of them; and consequently must have possessed, in early times at least, no very numerous Scandinavian population. Cumberland, on the contrary, was early remarkable for such a population; whence it will appear natural enough that the first Scandinavian colonists in the Scotch border lands preferred to settle in the neighbourhood of that county. On the south-easternmost coast of Scotland, they would not only have been separated from their countrymen in the north of England by two intervening counties, but also divided by a broad sea from their kinsmen in Denmark and Norway. Such a situation would have been much more exposed and dangerous for them than the opposite coast, where they had in their neighbourhood the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland, inhabited by the Northmen, as well as the Scandinavian colonies in Ireland and the Isle of Man. The Scandinavian population in Dumfriesshire evidently appears to have emigrated from Cumberland over the Liddle and Esk into the plains which spread themselves westward of those rivers; at least the names of places there have the very same character as in Cumberland. Not only are the mountains called “fell” (Fjeld) and “rigg” (Ryg), as is also the case in the other border lands, but, what is more peculiar to Dumfriesshire, the terminations of “thwaite,” “beck,” and “garth,” not to mention “by,” or “bie,” are transplanted hither from Cumberland: as, Thornythwaite, Twathwaites, Robiethwaite, Murraythwaite, Helbeck, Greenbeck, Botchbeck, Torbeck, Stonybeck, Waterbeck, Hartsgarth, Tundergarth, Applegarth, Locherby, Alby, Middlebie, Dunnaby, Wysebie, Perceby, Denbie, Newby, Milby, Warmanbie, Sorbie, Canoby, and others.