Roddy Maclean considers the place of the native hare in Gaelic folklore and landscape.
Leugh ann an Gàidhlig / Read in Gaelic
In the days before television or even electricity, our ancestors were very fond of dubh-fhaclan or riddles, and here is one such rhyming riddle with a nature theme:
Chì mi thugam air a’ bheinn,
Fear beag ’s beum na shròin,
Dà fhiacail fhada na chìr
Is cirb de bhlòigh na thòin.
‘I can see coming towards me on the mountain, a wee man with a split in his nose, two long teeth in his jaw and a ragged bit of a tail behind.’ The task of the audience in the taigh-cèilidh would have been to work out the subject of the riddle. It is, of course, the hare – a native mammal which is the subject of a considerable body of folklore in the world of the Gael.
The hare is generally referred to by one of two words in Gaelic, depending on dialect. The first is geàrr which is commonly heard in the traditional simile cho luath ri geàrr ‘as fast as a hare’. The word geàrr (pronounced GYAAR) literally means ‘short’ and arises from a reduction of the phrase geàrr-fhiadh, literally ‘short deer’. The inclusion of the word fiadh here is instructive because it is the root of fiadhaich ‘wild’ and other derivatives such as ath-fhiadhachadh ‘rewilding’, and both the fiadh and geàrr-fhiadh are considered in Gaelic folklore to be a link between the human world and wild nature. Through cruth-atharrachadh ‘shapeshifting’, a human can take on the form of a red deer or a hare. Outside the seal-people of the maritime west, the only other mammal that commonly permits folkloric shapeshifting is the cat and it might not be entirely coincidental that we call the wildcat an cat-fiadhaich. In all these examples, it is most commonly women, rather than men, that undergo such a transformation.
In one of many folkloric examples of hare-human transmogrification, a woman is said to have lived in a bothy near Baile a’ Chlaidh (Ballachly ‘the township of the cemetery’) in the parish of Latheron in Caithness. Her nickname was Am Fitheach ‘the raven’ (another animal with supernatural qualities); that name had arisen from the circumstance of a woman from Reay going to visit the wise woman to seek advice. However, when reaching her destination, rather than finding a woman, the visitor came upon a raven that was raking the grass with heather, presumably in an attempt to concoct a magic spell. The local woman had the reputation of being a witch and was blamed for the milking cows going dry. People had observed, not a raven but a hare, among the cows, and they suspected it of witchcraft – but neither they nor their dogs could catch the offending animal which would take off at speed towards the cemetery.
With stocks of butter and cheese running low, one man eventually set a snare, fixed to the ground with a peg of rowan wood, knowing that the rowan defends against witchcraft. A hare was trapped in the snare but when the man reached it, she had transformed into a woman – the local witch – confirmed as the source of the bad magic. She eventually left Caithness but the man who had trapped her suffered ill fortune and reputedly came to a sorry end in a drowning accident in the Thurso River. A little to the south of her home, beyond Stemster Hill – and I cannot confirm if the toponym bears any relation to her – is Cnoc na Gearra ‘the hill of the hare’. It might also be significant that the nearest hill to Ballachly is An Sìthean Mòr (Sidhean Mòr OS) ‘the great fairy hill’ – a place where the supernatural might be expected.
While the Witch of Ballachly reputedly survived, many tales inform us that the only way of dealing with such a supernatural being would be to shoot her, while she was in the form of a hare, with a silver bullet – and several ‘witches’ were reputed to have been dispatched in such a manner. Many tales exist of a hare being injured in a nightly confrontation, only for local people to find that in the morning a local woman bears an identical injury. This common belief in the shapeshifting hare may be responsible for the animal apparently being rarely consumed as a food item in the Gàidhealtachd.
Geàrr was clearly used in the old Caithness Gaelic dialect for ‘hare’. Sìthean na Gearra ‘the conical “fairy” hill of the hare’ lies in the heart of the Caithness Flow Country while Creag nan Geàrr ‘the rocky hill of the hares’ is to be found among the shapely Braemore hills in the south-east of the county on the border with Sutherland. However, in this instance the modern Ordnance Survey maps leave us a confusing picture, as an almost adjacent summit is given as Creag nam Maigheach, demonstrating usage of an alternative word for ‘hare’ in the same locality. Maigheach (pronounced MY-uch) – derives from magh ‘a plain’ – thus the hare is the ‘one that belongs to the plain’ (presumably referring originally to the Brown hare). It can also occur dialectally as moigheach and, interestingly, given the folkloric connections and their etymological origins, both geàrr and maigheach/moigheach are grammatically feminine. However, the OS Name Book tells us that the original form of Creag nam Maigheach was actually Creag nam Muthach. Although the OS maintains that they are alternate forms for ‘rock of the hares’, Dwelly’s dictionary tells us that muthach means ‘herdsman’ not ‘hare’.
To the west of this area, the word used in Dùthaich MhicAoidh, the Mackay Country of North Sutherland, is also geàrr, and Roy Wentworth’s dictionary of Gairloch Gaelic tells us that the local term there is geàrr, although moigheach is understood, and geàrr is given by Dieckhoff in his vocabulary based on the Glengarry dialect. However, Perthshire man, Robert Armstrong, in his 1825 dictionary, lists only maigheach, moigheach and the full compound noun geàrr-fhiadh.
In place names, there is potential for confusion between places named in geàrr for hares and those named in gearran for geldings or Highland ponies, with gearran being the ‘official’ genitive plural form of both, despite the form nan geàrr ‘of the hares’ being found in some toponyms. (As an aside, the English word garron ‘Highland pony’ comes from Gaelic gearran, meaning ‘one that has been castrated’). In their Name Books, the Ordnance Survey tell us that most gearran names such as Meall nan Gearran and Coire nan Gearran between Glengarry and Glenmoriston, and Cruach nan Gearran near Loch Fyne in Argyll, refer to horses. On the other hand, Càrn nan Gearran Bàna on the watershed between Glens Strathfarrar and Orrin means ‘the hill of the white hares’. There are, in addition, places named with the element maigheach in the genitive plural. I know of three hills called Meall nam Maigheach ‘the rounded hill of the hares’ – two are in Perthshire close to Glen Lyon and another lies at the northern end of Ardgour.
The animal was used traditionally in a number of medicinal treatments. The gall of the hare was used to treat eye problems, the blood was applied to skin blemishes and the brain was eaten to relieve severe headaches. A mixture of hare blood and skin was used to treat urine retention and bladder stones.
Hares also appear in a number of sayings and proverbs. For example: Cho luath ʼs gu bheil a’ gheàrr, beirear oirre ‘however swift the hare is, she can be caught’. And Is deacair geàrr a chur às an tom anns nach bi i ‘it is difficult to chase a hare from a tuft where she is not’. It was believed that a hare escaping from the final patch of grain to be cut was a lucky omen, whereas encountering a hare at the start of a long journey was a sign of bad luck. The Welsh polymath Edward Lhuyd noted that in the Highlands of Scotland meeting with a hare on high ground was reckoned to bring about misfortune.
The last presumably concerns the Mountain hare (Lepus timidus) which in Gaelic is the Geàrr-bhàn or Maigheach-bhàn ‘fair/white hare’ (reflecting its winter coloration) although bàn can be replaced by geal ‘snow-white’ or monadh ‘upland’ i.e. maigheach-mhonaidh in both compound names. In most instances of Gaelic cultural reference, the lowland Brown hare (Lepus europaeus) is not differentiated from the mountain species, as they share the same generic. However, we can specify the Brown hare by using the Gaelic colour descriptor donn ‘brown’ i.e. Maigheach-dhonn or Geàrr-dhonn.
The young hare – a ‘leveret’ in English – is known in Gaelic as a cuilean-maighich, isean-gearra, piseag-ghearraidh or gearrag, and the ‘form’ or nest is a cuach-gearra. Cuach means a hollow shaped somewhat like a bird’s nest (hares do not burrow but make a grassy nest) and is the origin of the Scots quaich, as it also means a shallow drinking vessel. As in other cultures, there was an ancient belief that a harelip was caused by an expectant mother’s exposure to a hare. Two terms for such a condition are milleadh-maighich and gearradh-maighich, both named for the hare.
Two other instances of the hare in Gaelic culture are the simile cho craicte ri geàrr as t-earrach ‘as daft as a hare in Spring’ which may have been influenced by the English saying ‘as mad as a March hare’ – reflecting on the species’ erratic behaviour at that time of year, and the beneficent nighttime wish cadal na maighich ort or cadal nam maigheach ort ‘may you have the sleep of the hare(s) – an equivalent to the English ‘may you sleep like a baby’. The sentiment is genuine (I was the recipient of such a good wish when I was among the Gaels of Cape Breton Island in Canada), but I have sometimes reflected on the fact that cailleachs in the form of hares would often spend the night working bad spells among the milking cows and that the phrase might originate in some, as yet perhaps unappreciated, supernatural reference.
This blog was written by Inverness-based writer, broadcaster and storyteller Roddy (Ruairidh) Maclean, whose work highlights the connections between the Gaelic language and Scotland’s environment.
Scotland's Nature 
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