Talk:Footdee

Reference to "St Fothan" in this article is questionable. There was a St Fothad who lived and worked in Ireland, but no known link to Scotland. St Fittick on the other hand, was reputedly washed ashore on the Scottish coast near Nigg, Aberdeen. There is a St Fittick's church in Torry, Aberdeen and the remains of the old church from which it took its name - the original version of which was said to be founded by St Fittick in the early Middle Ages - are near Nigg bay. If the name Fittie is not the Doric for Footdee as Aberdonians believe (and actually I believe them), then St Fittick seems a much more likely source for the name Fittie. However neither the original assertion regarding "St Fothan" nor any further conjecture are definitively provable without clear documentary evidence. The church near the original medieval Fittie site is St Clements, but the newer 1809 site is relatively close, as the crow flies or the fishing boat rows, to Nigg Bay, the old St Fitticks Church ruin and present-day St Fitticks Road. Fillane (talk) 09:02, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * The assertion that Fittie took its name from Fittick, or Fotin,* appears in multiple sources, but I don't find it convincing. As you said, there is a church of St Fittick in Torry, but there's no record of a similar dedication in the Fittie area. It seems more likely that, like Foodie in Fife, Fittie took its name from the Gaelic Fòdin, meaning "place of peats or divots" – cf. Fotyn, the 13th-century form of the name.


 * * These are apparently two different saints, though they were sometimes conflated. Zacwill (talk) 18:11, 8 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Add to this the fact that a genuine hagiotoponym would typically incorporate a generic and a specific element (e.g. Tobar Mhoire, "Mary's well"), whereas Fittie appears to be a simplex name. Zacwill (talk) 19:51, 8 July 2024 (UTC)