Bathgate - Derivation of the name?

Various historians have put forward different guesses for the meaning of the Bathgate name, but they seem to at least agree that it derives from the ancient Welsh or Cymbric. And they really are guesses even if they are educated!

One thing they are agreed upon is that the name can be broken down into two syllables. Over the centuries, it has been spelt variously as Badket, Batket, Bathket, Baythcat, Bathcat, Bathgait, Bathgaitt,

If we take one of the earliest - Badket and split it to become Bad-Ket and

It seems that the modern accepted meaning of the name is:

"boars wood" from the Welsh "baedd coed".

But there are alternatives which cannot be ruled out. When it comes to spelling the scribes of old were as careless as people are today. Sometimes a word was spelt differently in the same document. The only "spell-checker" in days gone by was purely phonetic and in the eye and ear of the beholder.

Robert Kerr suggested that it may have been:

"the wood of the graves" from "bedd coed" and added significantly that bedd is pronounced in Welsh as beth. Which in phonetic terms isn't far away from the modern "bath". So, the choice of the first syllable appears to be between

"baedd" or "bedd" i.e. "boar" or "grave". Back then wild boar were probably abundant as were graves. The physical evidence for graves exists; Sir James Y Simpson and others uncovered a fair number of stone kists in and around Bathgate from those times. Another option is "betws" which in Welsh can have two meanings; either "chapel/oratory" or "birch wood" as reference the town in Wales, Betws-y-coed - "the chapel in the birch wood".

If we consider the second syllable - it could be "coed" as is stated, but if you think of the sound of it - it could be "cad" or "cat". Both of these are accepted as meaning "battle" or "army". e.g. Sir James Young Simpson describes the Cat-Stane at Kirkliston as the stone marking the scene of a battle.

Taking all the foregoing conjecture together with the understanding that a great battle had been fought at or near Bathgate it would be reasonable to suggest that:

the name Bathgate is derived from "bedd cat" or "bedd cad" meaning "the graves of the battle". or "the graves of the army" As such an early equivalent to the WWI war graves of Belgium & France.

Which in the 7th century, would truly make Bathgate the dead centre of Scotland.

So there it is. You choose:   No pressure!

1  baedd coed         wood of the boars

2. bedd coed           graves in the wood

3. bedd cad   graves of the battle

betws-y-coed is too far fetched to really consider.