Iberban

Identification: the Bervie Water, in Grampian

The ban part of the name will originally have been a name like Abone/Abona, comprising the river-letter b corresponding to the hill-letter s. This will have been the situation during the 3rd century BC. Much later, perhaps in the early 1st century BC, an m-people, who had been living in the valleys of the Don and Urie, were displaced southwards and settled in the Mounth/Mearns area. These m-people, by now coining inversion-type place-names, added their river-letter r  at the front of ban. Later still an s-people were apparently displaced from their lands south of the Moray Firth and moved to the Mounth and the northern half of Strathmore. It was these s-people who put the initial b in Iberban. The name was later transferred, slightly modified to Iberran, to a Flavian fort built fairly close to the Bervie Water, most probably at a location where it could control movement across the Mounth. (The tribal migrations in the northeast of Scotland are discussed in detail in 'The Celtic "Picts"', 3.4, which may be accessed from the main menu above).

[NB. Detailed information as to the different river-letters and as to how they were combined to form compound river-names, together with information as to the four categories of Celtic river-names, is given in Chapter 19: the rivers of Roman Britain. Detailed information as to the different hill-letters is given in Chapter 1 and information as to how the hill-letters were combined to form compound place-names is given in Chapter 2]