What's in a name?

Early on in my daighter's pregnancy, attention was given to the name of the new baby.  Choices would have to be made for both the first name and the surname.  Iona was given responsibility for choosing the surname.
All the first names which made it to the long list were girls names.  But then there a lot more girls than boys names.  In the list produced by the National Register for Scotland, the alphabetic list of girls names only reach Lujane when the boys names run out (at Zygmut).
 A hospital appointment revealed the baby was a boy and the search for a boys name became more serious.  ‘Torran’ emerged and stuck.
 It is the name of a set of rocks off the island of Iona.  It is a navigation hazard and Robert Louis Stevenson used its potential for shipwreck in Kidnapped…..
 
Altogether it was no such ill night to keep the seas in; and I had begun to wonder what it was that sat so heavily upon the captain, when the brig rising suddenly on the top of a high swell, he pointed and cried to us to look. Away on the lee bow, a thing like a fountain rose out of the moonlit sea, and immediately after we heard a low sound of roaring.
"What do ye call that?" asked the captain, gloomily.
"The sea breaking on a reef," said Alan. "And now ye ken where it is; and what better would ye have?"
"Ay," said Hoseason, "if it was the only one."
And sure enough, just as he spoke there came a second fountain farther to the south.
"There!" said Hoseason. "Ye see for yourself. If I had kent of these reefs, if I had had a chart, or if Shuan had been spared, it's not sixty guineas, no, nor six hundred, would have made me risk my brig in sic a stoneyard! But you, sir, that was to pilot us, have ye never a word?"
"I'm thinking," said Alan, "these'll be what they call the Torran Rocks."
"Are there many of them?" says the captain.
"Truly, sir, I am nae pilot," said Alan; "but it sticks in my mind there are ten miles of them."
Mr. Riach and the captain looked at each other.
"There's a way through them, I suppose?" said the captain.
"Doubtless," said Alan, "but where? But it somehow runs in my mind once more that it is clearer under the land."
 
Riach, mentioned in the passage from Kidnapped above, is Richie’s mum’s family name.  The connection is tenuous and poetic.  Torran it had to be.
In 2015, it was the joint 588th most common boys name in Scotland with 4 registrations.
Today we visited Torran and saw the poster designed and gifted by one of his parents' friends.  Nice one.