CRANREUCH n.

The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) describes cranreuch as “hoar frost”. It’s from Gaelic crion-reòthadh, which has the same meaning.

An early example in DSL is from a poem published in the Scots Magazine of 1740:

“The winter now doth cauldly glowr, And crandroch spreads the meadows o’er”.

The early twentieth century produces this observation from R B Cunninghame Graham’s Scottish Stories (1914):

“The snow drifted half a yard upon the ground, the trees all white with cranruch like the sugar on a cake.”.

DSL also gives us some examples of figurative uses, such as this description of old age in a play called John o Arnha by George Beattie (1816):

“Full eighty winters thick hae spread Their cranreughs o’er my palsied head”.

Cranreuch can also describe a person’s cold heartedness, as here in Robert Buchanan’s London Poems (published in 1866):

“He … tried tender words, but they were spent Upon a heart where the cold cranreuch grew”.

I’m glad to say that the word survives into the twenty-first century. The National of December 2017 comments on the New Year Loony Dookers’ dip thus:

“the Loony Dookers tak tae the snell, cranreuch watters o South Queensferry an hae a soom tae raise siller fir chusen charities”.

Finally, also from the National of December 2017:

“The waither wis gey reuch fir traivellin; snell, cranreuch condeetions; the Crawfordjohn road icy an treacherous!”.

I had friends in the village of Crawfordjohn and usually confined my visits to the summer months, but from the few winter sorties I made I can certainly relate to this description of the wintry conditions.

This Scots Word of the Week was written by Pauline Cairns Speitel, Dictionaries of the Scots Language https://dsl.ac.uk.