Daphne Brooke was born into a middle class London family, became one of the first female high-flyers of the civil service, and a formidable campaigner on penal affairs; her last major contribution was to the history of Galloway.

Her childhood was not particularly happy. Her father, Francis Egerton Parker, a successful businessman in the display industry, was (like his father, the astronomer and biologist Francis St. John Parker) emotionally difficult, given to violent outbursts of temper. Nevertheless, friendships made in her childhood lasted through her life.

She entered University College London in 1938, where she read history; she specialised in the early medieval period and studied Anglo Saxon and Latin. During the first year of the war she was evacuated to Aberystwyth, where she completed her studies, and where she first became interested in the Welsh language. After graduating she entered the Administrative Branch of the Ministry of Agriculture, where she soon became a pioneer, rising to be the highest promoted woman in the civil service by the time of her resignation, and serving as Principal to Lord Carrington when he was Parliamentary Secretary.

In 1953 an office romance blossomed, and she married Tom Brooke. The marriage was overall a happy and successful one, lasting twenty five years. Following the birth of their third child in 1959, Daphne bowed to social pressure and resigned from the civil service to become a housewife - a role which she did not find entirely comfortable.

The family moved to Edinburgh in 1963, when her husband was posted to the Department of Agriculture for Scotland. Daphne initially found Scotland a very foreign country; however, from 1965 the family rented a second home in the village of Auchencairn in Galloway. Auchencairn was to become a centre for the family, and directly gave rise to the two of major interests of the second half of her life. She moved to the village permanently following the breakdown of her marriage in 1979, joining her son Simon, who was then running a pottery in the village.

In 1967, friends in the village had asked her to visit a young man who had spent some of his formative years in Auchencairn, who had become involved in petty crime and was serving a prison term in Saughton Young Offenders institution in Edinburgh. Daphne befriended the young man, visiting him regularly in prison and helping him to find accomodation and work after his release. In the course of this she became actively interested in the conditions of prisoners in Scotland, and in penal policy generally. She campaigned actively and vigorously for penal reform for over twenty years, and took a very active interest in the development of the Special Unit at Barlinnie.

But the other motif which came out of her relationship with Auchencairn was a reawakening of her interest in early medieval history, and this arose out of placenames. Daphne read Welsh, Anglo-Saxon and Latin, as well as a number of Romance languages. Coming to Galloway she quickly noticed the extraordinary variety of languages which provide placenames here. The cottage she rented stood adjacent to a field called 'Old Man' (Welsh: haul mhaen: 'sun stone') on a farm called 'Nether Hazelfield' (early English, 'lower stony field') in a village called 'Auchencairn' (Gaelic: achadh na carn: 'field (ploughland) of the cairn', or, more loosely, 'stony field') in a parish called 'Rerrick' (Scandinavian: hreyrr-eik: cairn oak). At the time there had been little detailed study of the early medieval history of Galloway, because there were few documents, and such documents as did exist were obscure and written in difficult languages. Daphne saw that study of placenames provided a key to understanding population movement, and through it understanding how Galloway had developed from the dawn of the Christian era to the fifteenth century.

This project became her primary preoccupation for the next thirty five years. With a scholar's single-mindedness and a civil servant's talent for organisation, she tracked down every document written about Galloway before 1500 AD, always seeking the original copy and reading it in its original language. In the process she catalogued many thousands of forms of many hundreds of placenames. The study took many years, and it was not until she was already old that it flowered into a series of academic papers and monographs, culminating in the publication of her book 'Wild Men and Holy Places' in 1995. At the time of her death she was working on a further book on the immediately pre-Christian and early Christian period in Galloway.

Daphne was for many years an active member of the Religious Society of Friends, and was instrumental in the formation of the Quaker Meeting in Castle Douglas.

She died in Castle Douglas Cottage Hospital on the morning of the 11th March, 2001. She is survived by one son, one daughter, and three grandchildren.