A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1050 entries
shieling
A stone-built shelter used during summer grazing months on the Hebridean or Highland moor. The journey to the shieling alone was a coming-of-age moment for a child. The paths to shielings were cairned onto the moor as guidelines through the bog. Cattle were driven up to high grazing in June, and the household (typically women and older children) lived at the shieling through the season making butter and cheese, coming down at harvest. The word covers both the ground and the structure — you can go to the shieling meaning the pasture. Gaelic equivalent àirigh, Norse ærgi in the Hebrides.
Etymology
Scots, from Old Norse skáli, a hut or shelter.
Notes
Shielings are different from bothies, which originally were quarters for unmarried farm or estate workers, mostly in the northeast (the bothy ballads come out of that world: bored young ploughmen singing about their employers). In current use, it means an unlocked, unstaffed shelter left open in remote country for anyone walking through. The Mountain Bothies Association maintains roughly a hundred of them across Britain. From Gaelic both/bothan, hut — same root as booth.