The earliest mention of heck in the Dictionary of the Scots Language is from the Edinburgh Burgh Records for the year 1551: “That all maner of stabillaris … haue thair stabillis weill and sufficientlie furnist with haik and maynger” where it refers to a rack for animal fodder. And in more recent times, we read in James Miller's A Fine White Stoor (1992): “He … threw lumps of the compressed grass into each of the cow's hecks”.

Such hecks were often referred to in conjunction with mangers. Thus we find the expression ‘at heck and manger' which means to live extravagantly. The following quotation from James Hogg's The Shepherd's Calendar (1829) will ring bells with many parents of today: “Go home with him to his father's house, during the vacation, and there live at heck and manger”.

A heck could also be a frame for drying cheeses, as in “A hake was frae the rigging hinging fu' Of quarter kebbocks tightly made an' new” from Alexander Ross's Helenore or the Fortunate Shepherdess (1768), or drying fish, as explained in The Scotsman (1930): “…a hake. It is a triangular frame studded with wooden spikes on which the fish are impaled through the eye” which gives rise to the name Auld Haiks for a fishing-ground off Fife.

Fishy meanings also include a grating placed in a watercourse to prevent fish getting through, although fish were not the only things that could be stopped by a heck; it could also be to deter sheep from straying along a burn, and on a more sinister note the Kelso Chronicle (1920) reported that: “The body was not recovered until it reached the heck at Ladylaw Mills”.

Hecks could also be the iron grating on a street gutter, or a framework on a cart to facilitate a higher load.  

Scots Word of the Week is written by Ann Ferguson of Scottish Language Dictionaries