Glossary

Much of this has come from the Dictionaries of the Scots Language [dsl.ac.uk]

Ban – Gaelic word meaning fair in colour

Bealach – Gaelic word for a mountain pass

Bigging – Scots word for building

Black-house – Traditional dwelling house in the Highlands and Islands, of double drystone walls with a core of earth, rounded corners and a thatched hipped roof resting on the inner side of the double walls and weighted down, with a central fireplace on an earthen floor; smoke escaped from the central fire through a hole in the roof

Bounty men – in 1718 the British government introduced a bounty to be paid to anyone who built a fishing boat to encourage the industry, the amount calculated on the tonnage of the craft. Because the small ‘country’ boats didn’t count and, perhaps more importantly, because they didn’t have the wherewithal to cure the fish themselves, the Barrisdale tenants sold any surplus to the bounty men

Caber – a beam or rafter

Caution – security; bail. Still used in Scots law

Cess – An assessment tax or levy. In Scotland it originally meant land-tax and it is still frequently used to denote a local tax of any kind

Clachan – a hamlet

Coire [corry/corrie] – from the Gaelic for cauldron or whirlpool it is applied to a hollow in a hill

Couple/couple-tree – one of the pairs of sloping rafters, forming two sides of a triangle, which support the roof of a building

Dirk – highland dagger

Dither – a good Scots word meaning to hesitate, be in a state of uncertainty; to dally

Dog days – the hottest part of the summer

Dropsy – old-fashioned name for an oedema, or the build-up of fluid in the tissue

Drove – an unenclosed road used for driving cattle, often to the great annual fairs or more local cattle markets

Factor – An agent or steward who manages land or house property for its proprietor; one who has charge of the administration of an estate

Fine – Gaelic word for the leading gentry of a clan

Fir – the old word for pine, not to be confused with the firs we have now, which are non-native species

Gille, anglicised to gillie – Gaelic for boy, but often meant attendant

Ground officer – An officiary is a division in a large Highland estate, each division being originally under the care of one ground officer

Herd – One who tends or watches over sheep or cattle, esp. in order to confine them to a particular pasture where fields are unfenced. It’s curious how now the word has come to mean the collective noun for the animals, rather than those who looked after them

Kailyard/kaill yeard – a small plot where kail and similar vegetables are grown, a kitchen-garden, esp. of a small cottage

Laird – the Scottish word equivalent to English lord

Lazy Bed – a method of planting potatoes (and other crops) on undug strips of soil and covering with manure and sods from adjacent trenches

Levada – an irrigation channel or aqueduct particular to the Portuguese island of Madeira

Munro – Scottish mountains over 3000 ft/911 metres with other inexplicable conditions attached, the original list being concocted by Sir Hugh Munro in 1891

Pendicle – something dependent on or subordinate to something else, an appendage, dependency, adjunct, satellite, appurtenance, a minor part

Pibroch – the music of the Scottish bagpipe, now limited to traditional gatherings, marches, salutes, laments etc. (in Gaelic called ceòl mor literally = great music)

Pillar of the kings – from Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Rings. I’m afraid I’m not very well-versed in the whole Lord of the Rings thing, but these pillars – known as the Argonath – were memorably portrayed in the 2001 film and I really did think of them when I saw this

Prestation – a feudal due, levy, exaction or tax

Quern – a primitive type of hand-mill for grinding corn

Sassenach (Gaelic; literally ‘Saxon’) – the non-Gaelic-speaking parts of Britain, including lowland Scotland as well as England. Wales wouldn’t be sassenach either, since Welsh is also a Celtic language

Seannachie (Gaelic; various spellings) – originally a professional recorder and reciter of family history, genealogy, traditions, etc., attached to the household of a clan chieftain or person of high rank, now a teller of traditional stories from the Celtic heroic legends

Shieling (various spellings) – a hut or rude shelter, a temporary house of stones, sods, etc., especially one built for the accommodation of shepherds and dairy maids in the higher or more remote areas used as summer grazing ground for sheep and cattle

Statute labour – In 1669 an act of parliament introduced the system of unpaid, compulsory labour (or ‘statute labour’) for roads maintenance. Justices of the peace were to require ‘all tennents and coatters [cottars] and their servants’ to work on the public roads for a fixed number of days each year

Soum – the number of livestock which can be supported by a certain amount of pasturage, usually assessed at one cow or a proportional number of sheep varying locally from four to ten per soum

Souming and rouming – estimating the number of animals which each tenant may pasture on the common ground

Stirk – a yearling bullock or heifer

Tacksman – one who holds a lease, a lessee. Specifically one who leases land, a tenant farmer, or one who leases land to sublet, also a lessee of property, mills, fishings, the collection of customs, teinds, dues, etc.

Tascal-money – the monetary reward formerly offered in the Highlands for information about stolen cattle and their thieves

Wadset – to give or pledge in security, specifically in Scots Law, to mortgage (land or other heritable property) by conveying it to a creditor who then undertook to reconvey it on repayment of the price, meanwhile drawing the rents as interest on the money lent

Wattle – a pliant rod, twig or wand; in roofing or thatching: the interwoven twigs upon which the turf or thatch was laid

Yell/yeld – not pregnant