Gàidhlig / English
Luairchean

Luairchean

Posted by Shelagh on Thursday 28 April 2016

The changeable weather this week doesn't seem to have put a stop to the new lambs and calves frolicking in the fields, but what happens when their mothers are not willing or able to feed them?
 
A luairchean was a ‘false calf’, the hide of a dead calf which was stuffed with rushes and put under a reluctant cow to encourage her to give milk. The word is derived from luachair, ‘rushes’ and was used by informants from Mull and Killin, Perthshire.

In some areas, this ‘false calf’ would be stuffed with straw rather than rushes – in Skye and South Uist it was called a laogh-biadhta, a ‘fattened calf’. Several other synonyms which appear in the Fieldwork Archive are derived from the Early Irish word cenn, ‘skin’, which is an element of the modern Gaelic word craiceann, ‘skin’. The word miniceag or minicneag was collected from speakers from Skye and is a diminuitive form of miniceann, ‘kid-skin’. Similarly, the word buachdan, from a Vatersay informant, is a varient of the noun boicionn, ‘cow skin’.

Often, the calf skin would simply be laid over a heap of earth next to the cow – this ‘false calf’ was called a tulachan, which literally translates as ‘little mound of earth’, derived from tulach, ‘hillock’. This word also exists in Scots as tulchan or tourkin, as in the term tourkin-calf. It was also used historically to refer to a ‘straw-man’, a person who held office in name only and whose revenue was diverted to his patron. The nickname Tulchan Bishops was given to bishops whose posts were created by James VI’s regent in the 1570s solely to allow him to ‘milk’ the church’s resources.

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