Pale brown strontianite, from the lead mines at Strontian

Strontian is an anglicisation of the Gaelic Sron an t-Sithein, meaning ‘nose-like hillside of the fairy mound’. The strontian lead mines were first exploited by Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope in the 1720s, with the help of investors such as General Wade and his protégé Edmund Burt, author of Letters from the North of Scotland (1754), as a manager. The element strontium was first described by Irish chemist Crawford Adair in 1790 and named after Strontian, making it the only element with a Gaelic-derived name.