DASG Blog

Bucach

The word I’ll be discussing today is Bucach. While this was originally the name for a person who hailed from Buckie on the north-east coast of Scotland it is a word which would gain a greater significance within the Gaelic communities of the north-west Highlands.
 
In his Gaelic Words and Phrases from Wester Ross, Roy Wentworth provides the following definition of Bucach:
 
"Buckie man n phr Bucach … He’s a Buckie man, ’s e Bucach a th’ ann. The Buckie people, na Bucaich. The relations of the Buckie man, fir a’ Bhucaich (nickname of a family in Poolewe)"
 
As this passage shows, Bucach or Bucaich were used as names for people from Buckie. Additionally, the family in Poolewe who were known as “fir a’ Bhucaich” or “The relations of the Buckie man” demonstrate that the family or descendants of a Bucach would retain this association in the form of a nickname even after they’d established local roots within a Gaelic community. Indeed, on the West Side of Lewis you’ll still hear people referring to an old house in Park, Barvas as “Taigh Iain a’ Bhucaich” or the “house of Iain the Buckie-man”.
 
But how, between Wester Ross and the West Side of Lewis, were Gaels and Bucaich in the habit of encountering each other and was there a deeper importance to the manner of this meeting and the place which Buckie and ‘Buckie-men’ would have in the culture and collective memory of Gaelic communities?
 
In the second half of the 19th century there was a huge growth of the fishing industry in the north of Scotland, in particular the herring fishery. Through this, links were made between disparate Gaelic and lowland communities which had not existed before. One consequence of this was that an annual migration occurred between them as workers from one side went to the other in pursuit of the herring. At the beginning of summer, fishing crews from the east coast would create upheaval and descend upon the fishing districts of the west Highlands. At the end of summer, the same thing would happen in the fishing townships of the east coast as Gaels migrated in search of work on the local fishing boats. These kinds of economic and cultural links were made between the west Highland communities and many east coast towns, ranging from Wick in Caithness to Anstruther in Fife. Despite this, Bucach came to be the common term used by Gaels to refer to anyone who came from the area ranging between Inverness and Arbroath - somewhat larger than Buckie itself! In Lewis in the Passing by Calum Ferguson we find the following evidence from the Stornoway man, George Smith:
 
"Any poor soul that was born anywhere between Arbroath and Inverness and came to Stornoway was regarded as a Bucach [pron. ‘book-ach’] which was a term originally applied to a ‘man from the east-coast port of Buckie’. If you weren’t from here you were a Bucach!"
 
Quite often it was also through the fishing industry that new customs and technology were introduced to Gaelic communities. We can therefore find evidence of bucach being used as an adjective to describe new wares and goods – for example, ‘briogais clò-bucach’ or ‘trousers of Buckie-tweed’ for fishermen’s trousers, or a type of boat that was known as a ‘bucach’. This can be compared to the way in which "Galld" could be used to mean something new or modern - for example, crofters would refer to artificial fertilisers as "todhar-gallda", lowland or non-Gaelic manure.
 
Because of the distance in language and wealth which often existed between Gaels and Bucaich there could often be animosity between them. When Gaels first started migrating to the east coast towns for fishing work they caused such anxiety that one prospective MP for Wick in the 1852 stood on a platform which stated that west Highlanders would be banned from coming to work there and Shetlanders would be brought in instead of them! Within Gaelic communities we can see the shape which this animosity could take take from the following passage in A’ Suathadh ri Iomadh Rubha where the author, Angus Campbell, remembers a drowning which occurred in Ness, Lewis some years before he was born:
 
"A boat from South Dell went down, and people could see that a ‘Bucach’ boat was near it. It was said that it [the ‘Bucach’ boat] didn’t make any attempt to save them. Dòmhnull Ghràisgean made a song about this loss – “’It was Monday she sailed, the magnificent new boat" – and in another verse he said, “How callous of that ‘Bucach’, that he didn’t cast a rope to them.”"
 
But despite the resentment or rivalry that there could be between Gaels and Bucaich (and wherever on the east coast the Bucaich actually hailed from) most often they were friendly to one another. If we return once more to George Smith:
 
"In the 1940s, the wee Bucach cooks on the fishing boats always had a hard time. ‘Dodie’ Campbell from Findochty…used to tell us that, as a young lad, he got a hammering downtown in Stornoway on a Saturday night, for no other reason than that he was a Bucach. Mind you, Dodie may have been trying to steal somebody’s girl. Who knows! There was a lot of intermarriage between the islanders and the visitors. A lot of the Bucaich married Lewis girls."
 
And whatever else occurred between Gaels and Bucaich, Gaelic poets would ensure that the Gaels got the last say, as we see from the lines of verse from Wester Ross with which Roy Wentworth concludes his definition of Bucach:
 
"Though the Buckie men are smart with their broad boats,
When the beating would start they couldn’t stand up to us"

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