The Tarf Water is a river in the former county of

Wigtownshire Wigtownshire or the County of Wigtown (, ) is one of the Counties of Scotland, historic counties of Scotland, covering an area in the south-west of the country. Until 1975, Wigtownshire was an counties of Scotland, administrative county used for ...

in south-west

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

. It rises on the

Ayrshire Ayrshire (, ) is a Counties of Scotland, historic county and registration county, in south-west Scotland, located on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. The lieutenancy areas of Scotland, lieutenancy area of Ayrshire and Arran covers the entirety ...

border and flows in a generally southeastward direction to meet the

River Bladnoch The Bladnoch is a river in Wigtownshire in the Machars of Galloway in southwest Scotland. One of the earliest descriptions of it is given by Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw and Sir David Dunbar in an appendix to Andrew Symson's work "A Large Descr ...

near the village of

Kirkcowan Kirkcowan is an area about 15 miles in length, and from nearly two to nearly seven miles in breadth, comprising 30,580 acres, of which 7000 are arable, 300 woodland and plantations, and the remainder meadow, pasture in Machars, in the historical ...

It has no major tributaries but is fed by several

burn A burn is an injury to skin, or other tissues, caused by heat, electricity, chemicals, friction, or ionizing radiation (such as sunburn, caused by ultraviolet radiation). Most burns are due to heat from hot fluids (called scalding), soli ...

s that drain an area characterised by

drumlin A drumlin, from the Irish word ("little ridge"), first recorded in 1833, in the classical sense is an elongated hill in the shape of an inverted spoon or half-buried egg formed by glacial ice acting on underlying unconsolidated till or groun ...

s and much of which has been afforested.Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 scale Landranger map sheets 76 ''Girvan'' and 82 ''Stranraer & Glenluce'' The name Tarf derives from the

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...

root ''*tauro-'' '

bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not Castration, castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e. cows proper), bulls have long been an important symbol cattle in r ...

aurochs The aurochs (''Bos primigenius''; or ; pl.: aurochs or aurochsen) is an extinct species of Bovini, bovine, considered to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. With a shoulder height of up to in bulls and in cows, it was one of t ...

'. Bulls occur frequently in Celtic river names, and these names may have had a mythological rather than literal referent. Like other examples of this name in southern Scotland, 'Tarf' is

Gaelic Gaelic (pronounced for Irish Gaelic and for Scots Gaelic) is an adjective that means "pertaining to the Gaels". It may refer to: Languages * Gaelic languages or Goidelic languages, a linguistic group that is one of the two branches of the Insul ...

in form but is likely to derive in turn from an earlier

Cumbric Cumbric is an extinct Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the ''Hen Ogledd'' or "Old North", in Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the ot ...

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

References

External links

* {{Coord, 54.9454, -4.7256, dim:20000_region:GB, display=title Rivers of Dumfries and Galloway