There are at least 8 Cookst*ns in Scotland, in the parishes of New Deer, Ellon, Kingsbarns, Airlie, Brechin, Banchory-Devenick, Stow and Kilmarnock. There's Coxton in the parish of St Andrews-Lhanbryd in Moray (which may be the place referred to upthread, and was farmed by some of my ancestors in the 19th century) and there are Cockstons in the parishes of Gartly, Kilbirnie, Spott and St Martins. There are probably others, which would come to light if it were possible to search the Scotland's Places web site either phonetically or using wildcards.
The point is that when the Session Clerk of Dailly was writing up the registers of baptisms in the 18th century, he had probably never heard of any of these. Baptisms of children to parents not resident in the parish were unusual, and the clerk would almost invariably have written, for example, 'Cookston in the parish of xyz' if the parents' residence wasn't in Dailly. The fact that two different session clerks, several decades apart, in Dailly just wrote 'Cookston' (by whatever spelling variant they thought fit at the time) pretty much proves that it was in the parish of Dailly.
Everyone has heard of the Highland Clearances, but far fewer are aware that the Lowlands also had clearances, partly because they mostly passed off relatively peacefully and the displaced people found new lives in towns or as waged agricultural workers. Large numbers of small crofts simply disappeared after the middle of the 18th century when the land was consolidated into larger farms, and it is likely that your Cookston is among them.
So while it is interesting to investigate places with similar names up to 200 miles from Dailly (including the one in Brechin where my 7th-great-grandparents farmed in the 1680s), it's not going to get you any further towards finding where your ancestors' Cookston was.
