Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/193

PEEFACE. clxxxv in corroboration of the truth of this statement, to a charter by William the Lyou to a town of A}t, which implies that a place called Laicht Alpin was in the border between Ayrshire and Galloway ; and he identifies it with an old ruin called Laicht Castle, on the bank of Loch Doon, which separates the county of Ayr from that of Kirkcudbright. The identification, however, is wrong, for the name of Laicht Alpin really belongs to the farms of Meikle and Little Laicht, on the eastern shore of Loch Eyan, which are within the county of Wigton, but adjoin that of Ayr, and on the very line of separation between the two counties is a large upright pillar- stone, to which the name of Laicht Alpin, or the monument or grave of Alpin, is actually appropriated. There can be little doubt that a fragment of true history has been preserved in the chronicle, which re- lates that he was slain by a man who lay in wait for him in a wood overhanging the entrance to the ford of a river as he was riding through it (No. xxxii.) The farm of Laicht is, in point of fact, on ground rising up to the north from the bank of a stream falling into Loch Eyan. It seems strange that Alpin, the last Scottish king of Dalriada, should have borne a peculiarly Pictish name, and that, when driven out of Dalriada, he should have seized on the province of Galloway, which had a Pictish population. We have his designation, even in the oldest lists, as the son of Echach, which was as pecu- liarly a Scottish name. It raises the presumption