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Learning in Literature

cranreuch n. hoar-frost

Categorised in:
“cranreuch n. hoar-frost”

7th January 2008

Cranreuch is often found in literary works, a modern example being Matthew Fitt’s Scots science-fiction novel But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000): ‘His mankit airm transmittit sensations simultaneously bleezin het an cranreuch cauld aroon his body’. The word is thought to be of Gaelic origin, although it is not identical with modern Gaelic for hoar-frost, and the precise etymology is unclear. The first known example of anything resembling Scots cranreuch is a reference to ‘the cranra and frost’ in a sixteenth-century poem by William Stewart.

Although the word may have been commonplace, early written evidence is scant. No other occurrences are known until Robert Law’s seventeenth-century work, Memorialls or The Memorable Things that Fell Out Within this Island of Brittain From 1638 to 1684, describes an occasion when there was ‘No frost at all excepting some crainroch or small frost’. But from that point forward cranreuch begins to appear in print more frequently, especially in poetry. In Robert Burns’ poem, To a Mouse (1785), it emphasises the destitution of the creature whose home he has wrecked with his plough: ‘Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble, But (without) house or hald (shelter), To thole the winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch cauld!’

The quotations for cranreuch in the Dictionary of the Scots Language www.dsl.ac.uk tend to focus on picturesque frost or metaphorical cold. G. Beattie uses it in an image of passing years in John o’ Arna (1816): ‘Full eighty winters thick hae spread Their cranreughs o’er my palsied head’. The word takes on a less literal meaning in R. W. Buchanan’s London Poems (1866): ‘He ... tried tender words, but they were spent Upon a heart where the cold cranreuch grew’. And in R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s Scottish Stories (1914) we return to the aesthetic: ‘The snow drifted half a yard upon the ground, the trees all white with cranruch like the sugar on a cake’.