Custodians of land and language pass on a rich legacy

Dr David Hume

Co Antrim historian Dr David Hume examines language preservation in Ulster-Scots communities.

WHEN I was a young boy the main attraction of the lint dams was the search for tadpoles. At the right time of the year you would see the dark green frog spawn lying lazily on the surface of the water. As time went on the tails of the tadpoles became more defined and they moved more.

 At some point they grew to frogs, which were altogether more sinister characters, or so I always thought, contemplating you silently, and apt to hop suddenly in any direction without warning. That the lint dams were their home was fine; it kept them contained.

 My father used to refer to the area of the lint dams as, and here I write it as he pronounced it, "the squaws". Although this conjured up thoughts of cowboys and Indians and assisted in boyhood imagings that the 'big field' where the squaws was to be found was some American prairie, in later life I began to wonder about that unusual name.

 I knew, of course, that it could have nothing to do with Indians.  I had never heard it used locally for any other location, adding to the sense of mystery.  I never got to explore with my father why he called that piece of our farm such a strange name.

 A few years ago I started to ask around, but to no avail. I had, I suspected, left it far too late. One of our neighbours was Davy Craig, a farmer from Ballycarry. Davy spoke with a broad tongue and, like my father, referred to the pol-is when speaking of the police, and talked too of the kye when referring to cattle on our farms. Just recently I happened to be reading Gary Hasting's book on Lambeg drums (With Fife and Drum, Belfast 2003) and came across something else that  reminded me of Davy.

 On the July 12, like the rest of us, he loved to hear the bands and see the Orange parade. One year Davy went to the Twelfth in Antrim and he was in great glee about the "Peter Dicks" as he called them. He was talking about the lambeg drums that clattered their way into the town centre with their lodges.

 I know little about Lambeg drums and certainly nothing of the tunes that go with them. I found with interest from Gary Hasting's book that one of the Co Antrim tunes played on the lambeg is known as "Peter Dick". What was doubly interesting about it was that the tune Peter Dick was noted as having been played by Ancient Order of Hibernian drummers in Loughguile in Co Antrim. Was it played by Orange drums too?

 Davy, without knowing it, had passed on a coded message from his past, with his reference to the drums. It illustrates that sometimes language can be passed down in an almost subconscious way, being so commonplace to the user that he does not consider that others might not truly comprehend its meaning.

 Davy Craig is long dead now too, remembered in Ballycarry as the last man in our district to continue ploughing with horses after the advent of the tractor. Maybe Davy would have known about the origin of the word squaws, but again, I was too late.

 I asked folklore experts, local historians, Irish speakers (who are pretty thin on the ground around Ballycarry), and others, all in an effort to find what on earth the strange name on our farm meant. Most fields were named, as was common practice in bygone generations with cattle as well as property. But the names were functional; the dam field, where a small dam was located, the low fields, which lay on an incline to the east, the quarry field, where stone and earth had been extracted in bygone years.

 And it was the functional side of farming language which was the clue. I  consulted Dr. Philip Robinson's grammar of the Ulster-Scots language and James Fenton's equally brilliant Co Antrim dictionary, both to no avail. There was no mention of the word squaw. For some reason I decided a different approach. I stopped looking for 'squaw' being spelt in that way. It had always been a dubious proposition in any case.  And there was the answer.

 Something made me turn to Fenton's dictionary and flick through the Q section, and there was the solution to the whole mystery. The word qua was a good old Co Antrim Ulster-Scots term.  And it referred to wet places. The lint dams were clearly a wet place, but the topography of the area suggested that there had previously been a marshy area, deemed appropriate to create lint dams and feed the water into. That this area pre-dated the lint dams suggested that the turn of phrase in referring to it went back further too.

 So when my father, and probably his father, had referred to the (s)qua's, they were using Ulster-Scots to describe an important part of the landscape of their farm. Phillip Robinson's grammar provides examples of unexpected appearances for letters in Ulster-Scots. Hugh can, for example, be delivered as 'shooey' in Ulster-Scots. James Fenton, in another example, informs us that the word quuster (based on twist/quust) was used for a straw-rope twister.

 And in Aldfreck townland of Ballycarry, they used squa's instead of qua, making, it would appear, a subtle change to standard Co Antrim Ulster-Scots. They were, like Davy Craig and the others of their generation, and a few I know who still use the language in their natural day-to-day conversations, custodians of not only land their forefathers had ploughed, but also of a language dating back centuries long gone.

 All of this may seem rather basic to devoted and expert Ulster-Scots speakers and language enthusiasts. But as one who is an expert in neither although a devotee of both, this saga of that one word qua was exciting stuff.Ulster-Scots was (and, it would seem, still is!) essentially a rural language and one that survived by word of mouth from one generation to another. It was not generally a written language in bygone generations apart from a few periods, and it was often a language looked down upon by those with a better education.

 James Orr, Bard of Ballycarry, gives a fine example of this outlook and how it impacted on the ordinary people of his locality. In his exceptional poem The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial he talks of how the clergyman came to visit the house of the deceased. The minister would with the teacher, have been among the most educated and influential of figures in any Ulster-Scots community.

 When the minister came to call, the country folk tried to impress him with their knowledge. Orr tells us that they "try to quat braid Scotch, a task that foils their art; /For while they join his converse, vain though shy/They monie a lang learn'd word misca' an' misapply".

 The country folk could not escape their heritage. Nor did they avoid their destiny to pass down something of an ancient language to new generations.

 Of course, they would not have known that the language they spoke was believed to be west Germanic in origin  possibly related not only to Scots emigrants but also Old Norse settlement and trade. Such information was for the bookworms and those who had got to college. Simple folk had no need to think on such matters. Their task was simple and practical they passed on the language.

 In a world which is often geared up to academic achievement and obtaining grades and qualifications, there is a distinct irony in that the precious heritage of language was almost destroyed through better education, while the less well-educated clasped it and held it for the future.

 A couple of years ago, I was engaged by a local council to undertake some historical work with a youth group. In doing so I provided a standard list of Ulster-Scots names for parts of the body (fizog, e'en, neb, fit, hunkers, shanks, etc) to see how much the young folk recognised. This was in a working class Protestant estate and I did not expect great things from teenagers who knew little, as it had transpired, about their history generally.

 It was a pleasant surprise when, working together in groups, they came back quickly with all 12 of my Ulster-Scots words correctly identified. These were words they had heard in their homes and among their peers in ordinary conversation.

 Recently I also had the pleasure of working with Ernie Scott, of Ballynure, an expert in Ulster-Scots in East Antrim and beyond, in teaching basic Ulster-Scots to a class in Larne. This class started with trepidation for its adult learner students, not least through the idea that written work from them would be part of our studies.
 It was a tremendous experience of the ability of a mixed group in terms of age and background in providing exceptional material in Ulster-Scots. The class tackled everything from translating the Christmas story in the Bible to writing accounts of daily life, of memories of farming in bygone times, and of Ulster-Scots heroes such as Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston. A class member Rachel Currie of Ballyclare, a natural Ulster-Scot speaker, produced a fantastic short poem based on the theme of General Sam Houston, whose people came from near her home and whose name echoed from space;

Fa Ballyboley braes
a step fer Ulster kind
Fer toil an leadership
a step fer American kind
Fer justice an peace
a step fer human kind
Ta tha moon an beyond
a step fer mankind;
Huston calling,
Huston calling...!

 This was just an example of material of merit produced by ordinary people who came back to the classroom, some of whom recounted how they were told off (or worse) as children for using native Ulster-Scots in school years ago.

 All of this gives hope for the continued revival of Ulster-Scots. It has been severely damaged over the generations and the decades. Sentence structures have been lost to the point where often only words or phrases remain. But each word and phrase that has survived can and no doubt will be used to build again the foundations of the language and its future.

 That is why I was so excited about the qua's when I found the answer to my own little mystery. It took me years but the sense of satisfaction in discovery was great. In preserving our language, word by word, we are building for the future. Its akin to us each having a brick to lay in order to construct a large building. Will you bring your brick to the building site?

 It would be, to paraphrase Rachel Currie, un sma' step fer us a'...