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Dùn is a Scottish and Irish Gaelic word for a small fortress, or fortified dwelling place.[1] Often hill forts,[2] dùns usually consist of a stone wall surrounding a large house and its associated outbuildings. They seem to have arrived in the British Isles with the Celts in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE.[3]
The Gaelic word dùn appears as part of many place-names, sometimes separately as in Dún Scaith, and at other times joined, especially when anglicised.[1] Dunkeld, the Gaelic name for Dùn Chailleann, meaning “fort of the Caledonians”, is one example of the latter.[4]
Some anglicised place-names may be derived from a Brittonic cognate of the Welsh form din in Northern England and Southern Scotland, where substitution of the Brittonic form by its Gaelic equivalent may have been widespread.[2]