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54 Gaelic Society of Inverness.
—
"Thig a' chuthag sa' mhios Cheitein oirnn."
And the cuckoo will come iu tlie month of May.
A very common superstition in the Highlands was, that it was
very unlucky to hear the cuckoo, for the first time in the season,
before breakfast or while fasting, whence the old rhyme
"Chuala mi 'chubhag gun bhiadli 'am blu-oinn.
Ohunnaic mi'n seaiTach 's a chulaobh riura,
Chunnaic mi'n t-seilcheag air an lie luim,
'S dh'aithnich mi uach i-achadh a' bhliadhn'ud leam."
I heard the cuckoo while fasting,
I saw the foal with its back to me,
I saw the snail on the flag-stone bare,
And I knew the year would be bad for me.
On the 1st April, All Fools' Day, when any one is sent on a fool's
errand, it is in Gaelic—A chuir a ruith na cubhaig—sending him
to chase the cuckoo—because, of course, there are no cuckoos on
that early date ; and in broad Scotch it is—to hunt the gowk,
the word gowk being merely a corruption of the Gaelic cubhag,
the pronunciation of both words being almost identical. And in
some other languages the name of the cuckoo is even nearer to the
Scotch word gowk—as in Swedish, gjok ; and in Danish, gouk.
So that the Scotch gowk, though originally only ajjplicd to the
1st of April cuckoo-hunting fool, is now applied to any fool during
any of the other 3G4 days of the year. If we can rely u[)oii
Pennant, time was when even a fool might hunt up a cuckoo on
1st April or before, as he says—
" I have two evidences of their
being heard as early as February : one was in the latter end of
that month, 1771, the other on the -Ith February 17G9 : the
weather in the last Avas unconnnonly warm.'" Truly, these were
the good old days, especially for the cuckoos. Alex. Macdonald
generally in his poems calls it the blue-backed cuckoo
And
'S goic-mhoit aii- cuthaig chiil-ghuirm,
'S gug-gug aic' ail- a' gheig.
Cuthag chul-ghorm cur na'n smuid d' i
Ann an duslainn challtainn.
Another Gaelic bard, William Ross, in a well-known song, makes
a pathetic appeal to the cuckoo to sympathise with him in his
giief
—