In the book I’ve just read, The Old Ways – A Journey on Foot, by Robert MacFarlane, there are quite a few words that are unfamiliar to me. The author has provided definitions of some of them within the text, or in the glossary at the back of the book, and one word that really caught my attention was the Scottish Gaelic word èig, which is defined as
‘the quarz crystals on the beds of moorland stream-pools that catch and reflect moonlight, and therefore draw migrating salmon to them in the late summer and autumn’.
Very poetic, but it seems a awful lot of meaning to be carried by a single word, so I searched my Gaelic dictionaries, but have been unable to find this word, or anything quite like it. It might be a local word used only in the island of Lewis, or maybe the person who told the author about it was using a touch of poetic licence.
Have you ever come across this word or anything like it?
