href=”https://lovingleed.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/glen.jpg”>The word Glen turns up in songs all of the time and is common name for Scottish men. Sometimes then its spelled Glen. The Urquharts are particularly fond of the name becauce their ancestral homeland is a glen. Like many geographical names it comes from Gaelic rather than Norse, where it’s spelled gleann.

In more common terms, and I think as time went on, glen came to be used to mean narrow valleys used mostly for recreational transportation. In former times they meant wider places as well. The mountains in Scotland are old; they are the northernmost extension of the Appalachian Mountains in United States. The ocean in between has closed, opened, and closed, and opened again since their formation, and there has been plenty of erosion. So the land in the glens would, in theory, be quite fertile, if not abundant.

In songs people are always walking either in old forests or in meadows of flowers. I had an insight into the latter recently. Without fertilizer, you need to rotate crops in order to give the land a chance to recharge minerals and proteins<a . Since these fallow lands have no completing plants, they often burst forward in wildflowers and are beautiful sights to see. So ancient Scots always had a beautiful place to walk somewhere nearby. I wonder if it's still the case.