[NB The brief explanation given below has been drafted on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the basic building-blocks used in Celtic topographical place-names (Chapter 1 of the Home menu), with the structure of compound place-names (Chapter 2) and with the structure of Celtic river-names (Chapter 19)]
The Geography of Ptolemy appears to be the only ancient source which refers to the Venicones.
The tribal name Venicones appears to be based on a topographical place-name, perhaps of the form Veniconion and presumably the name of the tribal centre. Venic is an inversion-type place-name element meaning ‘slope of hill steep’. The vowels in the name are not important, the element Venic being seen as Vanc in Vancomagi, apparently the original form of the tribal name Vacomagi. But note that the v/b interchange is very common in Romano-British place-names, so it is possible that the tribal centre had earlier been called Beniconion and the tribe the Benicones, where Benic is a transitional element meaning ‘high hill steep’. The Venicones/Benicones used the hill-letter n2 and occupied a swathe of land stretching east/southeast from Bograndium at Braco in Perth and Kinross.
[This page was last modified on 24 March 2021]
