Rousay Mending: A Footnote—Bibliography, and Endnotes

Bibliography

Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (revised edition) (Edinburgh: Reaktion Books, 1992)

Stephen Bann, “‘The Horizon of Holland’: A Poetic Prelude to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardens”, in Stephen Bann (ed.) Interlacing Words and Things: Bridging the Nature-Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscape (Dumbarton Oaks: Washington, D.C., 2012), pp. 37-49

Stephen Bann (ed.), Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann 1964-69 (London: Wilmington Square Books, 2014)

Archie Bevan and Brian Murray (eds.), The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown (London: John Murray, 2006)

George Mackay Brown, For the Islands I Sing: An Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1997)

Caroline Butterfield, Ron Bulmer, Thorfinn Johnston, Maurice Davidson (eds.), The Orkney Yole (Stromness: Orkney Yole Association, 2021)

Ken Cockburn, The Dancers Inherit the Party: Early Stories, Poems and Plays (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004)

Cid Corman (ed.), Origin Series 2, No. 6 (Kyoto: Origin, July 1962)

Patrick Eyres, “A People’s Arcadia”, in Patrick Eyres (ed.) New Arcadian Journal No. 33/34 (New Arcadian Press, 1992)

Alec Finlay (ed.), Ian Hamilton Finlay (Edinburgh: Chapman 78-79, 1994)

Alec Finlay (ed.), Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995)

Alec Finlay (ed.), Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Dancers Inherit the Party and Glasgow Beasts (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996)

Alec Finlay (ed.), Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012)

Emile Flett, Orkney in Wartime: The People's Story, Vol. 1 (Kirkwall: The Orcadian, 2022)

Simon W. Hall, The History of Orkney Literature (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010)

Ross Hair, Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016)

Vanessa Hanneschläger, Ernst Jandl Ian Hamilton Finlay: not/a concrete poet Briefwechsel 1964-1985 (Vienna: Folio Verlag, 2017)

Gregor Lamb, Orkney Wordbook (Kirkwall: Byrgisey, 1995)

James McGonigal and John Coyle (eds.) The Midnight Letterbox: Edwin Morgan, Selected Correspondence 1950-2010 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015)

Hugh Marwick, The Place Names of Rousay (Kirkwall, 1947)

Hugh Marwick, Orkney (London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1951)

Edwin Morgan, Essays (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1974)

Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 2000)

Jessie Sheeler, “Some Toys” in Janet Boulton, Remembering Little Sparta: Watercolours, Reliefs, Garden Works 1993–2009 (Oxford: Janet Bolton, 2009)

Nicola Simpson (ed.) Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (London: Occasional Papers, 2012)

Herbert Spence (ed.), Typographica 8 (London: Lund Humphries, 1963)

Alistair Peebles, “Labour, Blossom: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Orkney” https://www.hydrohotel.net/Prose7Web.pdf (2011)

Alistair Peebles and Michael Lloyd, The Boat in the Writing Room: Retracing the Origins of Stonypath, Little Sparta (film, 57') flytingfilms and Brae Editions (2025)

Alistair Peebles, An Orcadian Arcadia: Gods of the Earth/ Gods of the Sea, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Robin Gillanders, Two Pier Arts Centre Commissions (Orkney: Brae Editions with the Pier Arts Centre, forthcoming)

Stephen Scobie, Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997)

Greg Thomas, Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019)

John Wakeman (ed.) World Authors, 1950-1970 (New York: HW Wilson, 1975)

Endnotes

1. Abrioux (1992) pp. 1 & 309.
2. Alec Finlay (1996) p. 101.
3. An illness typically said by Finlay to have been of no interest as regards his art, and till more recently often overlooked in commentary. For example, it is not mentioned in Abrioux (1992).
4. Cf. “[T]he garden around the poet’s home at Stonypath [is] both an ongoing work and a nursery of ideas which are transplanted, through proposals and commissions, to larger sites, predominantly in Europe and the U.S.A.”, Eyres (1992) p. 76.
5. Abrioux (1992) p. 1.
6. The text itself expands upon the parenthesis. The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness is an obvious exception, including in previously having collected and exhibited Finlay's work, and in having had the visionary ambition to commission Gods of the Earth/ Gods of the Sea. No more than any other individual or agency, however, does it appear to have been aware of the extent to which Finlay had mythologised his island connection. In my own case it might have been an advantage if I'd begun my research at an earlier stage, and there are certainly some individuals I would dearly like to have spoken to, including the artists Bet Low (1924-2007) and Margot Sandeman (1922-2009). But as I reflect now on the beginning of the process, one important factor is the near-impossibility of such a project for a private individual—especially one based in Orkney, even if in a sense that was the ideal starting point—until a certain stage had been reached not only in what might loosely be termed his career, but in the development of the internet.
7. Alec Finlay (2012) p. 301.
8. Abrioux (1992) p. 159.
9. Cf. "Ian Hamilton Finlay has long practised the epideictic mode of the homage", Abrioux (1992), p. 204. Abrioux gives the examples there of Gris and the German-born art collector and dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, champion of the Cubists and author among other titles, of Juan Gris: His Life and Work (1946, translated into English by Douglas Cooper, 1947). As Abrioux specifies, this was a book read and admired, and responded to, by Finlay, and he adds that in a letter to Stephen Scobie of 1970, "Finlay commented ... that it needed a concluding chapter on concrete poetry." Cf. Scobie (1997) in which the Canadian poet and critic provides just such a conclusion.
10. Abrioux (1992) p. 159.
11. When I visited Gibson, Brinian, Rousay, on the suggestion of the Stromness artist and historian Bryce Wilson, in March 2010.
12. As Tommy Gibson also pointed out. See Peebles (2011) n.p. Alec Finlay had corrected the story on Wikipedia. Cf. “The outbreak of war disrupted [Finlay's] schooling. He writes Ernst Jandl: ‘This is the anniversary of the start of the war (for Britain). Third September ’39 I was a wee boy with a label round his neck, newly evacuated (from the city) to a little Highland village. No school, but pinewoods, wee burns, rabbits, trout, salmon, mountains . . . what happiness’,” Alec Finlay (2012) p. 7. On a point of clarification as regards the text's preceding sentence, there were of course individual instances in which children with a family connection to Orkney were permitted, on completion of the necessary paperwork, to move to the islands from sites of perceived danger, for longer or shorter periods. (Might this have been what Finlay was implying?) But no evacuations as such took place. As a curious corollary, cf. “In January, 1940, the authorities had to publicly deny rumours, ranging from all Kirkwall, Stromness and Flotta school children to all women and children in Orkney, being evacuated to Caithness, Sutherland and the Highlands. Their denial in The Orcadian, under the heading ‘Orkney Children Not To be Evacuated’, speculated that these 'cruellest rumours' had possibly begun after teachers had asked pupils to get details from their parents for use in the new Record Card Scheme coming into operation. Despite the official denial, evacuation rumours persisted and a month later The Orkney Herald was again urging its readers to ignore the 'rumour mongers'.” Flett (2022) p.50.
13. The account that the “Notes” provide about Finlay’s Army career is brief, and chronologically dubious. It omits the fact that Finlay registered as a Conscientious Objector, albeit virtually unknown. For that reason he served initially in the Non-Combatant Corps. Rather than in 1942, he will have been called up in late 1943 at age 18, enlisting in the NCC the following year and transferring to the Royal Army Service Corps in 1946. Further information on this and other matters will be included in my proposed biography.
14. A concept that was also not included, for obvious reasons, in Abrioux (1992), again to be further explored in due course. Meanwhile, cf., from Alec Finlay (2012) p. 23—the citations being taken from letters to the US poets in question, May-August 1962—"[Finlay] also conceived the first of his battle scenarios, a happening-inspired protest march, gleefully described to [Robert] Creeley: 'there was no march of course as no one here is on our side, but we invented it, and I said there would be a zeppelin, taschiste banners, enormous balloons, etc., and that we would march on The Writers’ Conference; so everyone believed it, and the magistrates made a special Order to ban it, ‘March Banned BUT Feud Goes On’ as one paper headlined it; then they reported on the radio that we planned to burn effigies of public figures in the streets ... nervous trouble or not, we took a taxi up [to The Scotsman newspaper] and Jessie [McGuffie] punched the literary editor.' To [Cid] Corman he noted the bravado of the enterprise, ‘the Myth was greater than the March could ever have been ... Well, I always did say that myth could be a powerful weapon.’ And to [Jerome] Rothenberg he enthused about the ‘didactic creative’ excitement: ‘I begin to feel why people like to have revolutions—to sense the patterns, and bet on them, and see them emerge—sheer delight!’ Two decades later Finlay refined this ‘delight’ into a specific revolution, that of Robespierre and Saint-Just, actualizing the ‘zeppelin myth’, in the form of a replica Panzer tank defending his garden."
15. Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Autobiographical Sketch” in Alec Finlay (2012) p. xix. First published in an edited version in Wakeman (1975). It was written some ten years before that date, and is referred to here for convenience as Finlay's "c.1965 account."
16. Cf. “Finlay was the greatest Scottish writer of letters since Robert Louis Stevenson; letters were his favourite emblem of friendship, his primary method of working with collaborators, and his weapon of choice.” Alec Finlay (2012) p. 5.
17. A long story, but in September 2009, when he was visiting Orkney, Alec asked if I would take a photograph of the house in Rousay in which his father had lived. I visited Tommy Gibson early the following year, by then only in part to learn something of the history of the house and its ownership, for it was clear that more sleuthing would be required: in effect to establish exactly when it was that Finlay had been in Orkney, why he had come there, and what difference had it made. And given its evident importance in the career of a major Scottish poet and artist, how had it come about that with the notable exception mentioned above the connection had largely been forgotten locally. Cf. Peebles (2011) n.p.
18. Alec Finlay, “Afterword” in Alec Finlay (1996) p. 101.
19. Alec Finlay (2012) p. 2.
20. Cf. Finlay's letter to Brown as cited in Alec Finlay (2012) p. 38. See also Peebles and Lloyd (2025).
21. Brown, letter to Charles Senior, 5 July 1966 (Edinburgh University Library).
22. Brown (1997) p. 163.
23. Cf. Peebles (2011) n.p.
24. “A neoclassical Arcadia, a juxtaposition of landscape, material form and text designed to engender contemplation, wonder, even awe”/ “A neoclassical Arcadia—a constructed space beholden especially to the traditions of the 18th century English landscape garden, particularly ‘within a syntax of Virgilian reference’” (A remark made by D.C.C. Chambers, cited in Finola O’Kane Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004) p. 144.)/ “As Eyres has observed of such ‘Arcadias’, Arne exemplified Finlay’s concern to ‘conjoin nature and culture, so that the ambience of a place can stimulate reverie’, this being achieved through a ‘strategy of inscription and invocation.’” (Patrick Eyres, “Envisioning the Fourth Arcadia: A Proposal for Arne”, in Patrick Eyres (ed.) New Arcadian Journal No. 45/46 (New Arcadian Press, 1998), p. 98.). Excerpts from Peebles (forthcoming).
25. Cf. "He is very direct but also unexpectedly diffident. Why, I asked, is he so interested in the French Revolution? ‘Because I am a revolutionary’, he replies, looking at me sharply, then adding, ‘at least I hope so’. And then, ‘because it is the prime example of neo-classical art in action’. Sue Innes, ‘Man of Sparta’, The Scotsman Magazine Vol 9, No. 3, 1988, in Alec Finlay (1995) p. 9.
26. Cf. Peebles (forthcoming)
27. "Nassau seems quite inappropriate, fictional. If you wanted to get an idea of me, it would be better to believe I had been born in Orkney rather than the Bahamas." Ian Hamilton Finlay interviewed by Cathy Courtenay, Artists’ Lives series, British Library, 1993.
28. Ibid. In a major, agenda-setting survey of Finlay’s career of 1977, Finlay’s actual birthplace in the Bahamas is in a way elided with what by then had become his place of ideal or mythic origin. “Ian Hamilton Finlay: An Imaginary Portrait” by the poet’s friend, the poet, historian and critic Stephen Bann, provided a substantial introduction to Finlay and his work at his seminal first major London exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. Writing to Bann some years previously, Finlay had described Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits as his “Favourite Book of All”, and as Bann acknowledges, his choice of this as a model for his essay “[o]bviously ... implies a certain obliquity as far as the biographical basis is concerned.” Stephen Bann, op. cit., in Alec Finlay (1995) p. 13.
29. Christa Leve Poulsen, unpublished interview with Ian Hamilton Finlay, conducted at Little Sparta, June 1997. Reproduced by courtesy of the interviewer and of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay. By this stage in the interview, having “sacrificed” the first half of a football match, Finlay is keen not to miss the start of the second. The hills in question might be the Tinto Hills to the south west, or the Moffat Hills, further east. (At first I'd thought it might be a range of hills nearer the garden that was being referred to, that enclose the Vale of Dunsyre to the south east. But the point at which Finlay and Poulsen have reached on their tour make this impossible (never mind the reference to "meadowland"—and the fact that what lies directly in view from the best vantage point for the hills in question, The Present Order, is Lochan Eck). The summit of the small but prominent range is called the Black Mount, but a Stonypathian/Little Spartan nickname, as I have been reminded by the poet and critic Harry Gilonis, a friend of Finlay's, is "the MacDiarmid Alps", reputed to have been "raised by the great man to shield him from Finlay's baleful influence." MacDiarmid, no stranger indeed to geology, lived around 5 miles south-south-east of Stonypath, at Brownsbank in Candymill, on the other side of the hills.) The match in question might have been the World Cup qualifier between Belarus and Scotland (0-1) at the Dinamo Stadium, Minsk, on Sunday 8/6/97. If so, then Finlay may have been in time to see Gary McAllister score the winning goal from a penalty in the 49th minute.
30. Alec Finlay has rightly remarked on the way in which "IHF is always aware of the hills that mark his horizon—thinking of the sketch of Mor-bheinn [cf. Bann (2014) p. 36], and the 'Hills of Erin' at Gledfield in Easter Ross [ibid., p. 54]".
31. See also, e.g., “Fishing from the Back of Rousay”, Lines Review 17 (Edinburgh, 1961), and The New Shetlander No. 57 (Summer 1961). Cf. Alec Finlay (2012) pp. 124-125
32. Alec Finlay (2012) p. 11.
33. Ann Scott-Moncrieff, “What for a Wheesi-Whassigo!”, BBC Scottish Programme, 9 November 1936. Cf. genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/3694c4b20a65967278b3e7542852e3fb. With thanks for the reference to Dr. Linden Bicket, who has edited Scott-Moncrieff's work and is at work on a literary biography.
34. Marwick (1951) p. 169.
35. “Mansie Considers the Sea in the Manner of Hugh MacDiarmid” is included in The Dancers Inherit the Party as one of the “Orkney Lyrics”. The title is itself an echo of MacDiarmid’s “Shetland Lyrics”, in Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934; 1956) although other than the use of the islands’ respective dialects there are no obvious influences or connections, which may in itself be significant. For an account of their antagonistic relationship, see, e.g., Alec Finlay "Afterword" (1996) passim; Cockburn (2004) pp. xv-xvi; Alec Finlay (2012), pp. 22-24; Hair, Ch. 2, "Ian Hamilton Finlay: Scottish Futurist"; and Thomas (2019) pp. 66-67 and 75-77.
36. The origin of the word “peedie” and its earlier equivalent “peerie”, writes Gregor Lamb, is “lost in the Nordic languages,” Lamb (1995) p. 88. By comparison with many poets who employ the Orkney dialect, Finlay uses “peedie” relatively frequently: a total of 14 times in the c.19 Orkney-related poems in The Dancers, including titles, which apart from an evident fondness for the word doubtless reflects the fact that like “wee” it is very common in ordinary usage. By contrast, of the 26 poems in The Collected Dialect Poems of C.M. Costie (Kirkwall, 1974) “peerie” features only 7 times, including in the superlative “peeriest”. Costie (1902-1967) was a locally noted dialect writer. Again by contrast with The Dancers, the word is not listed in the glossary. As a more contemporary comparison, “Peedie” occurs c.13 times in the 163-page dialect verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, including in the tidily comparative phrase “a peedie bit peedier” (London: Picador, 2021). See p. 66.
37. Cf. Richard Price, "Migrant the Magnificent", n.d., www.hydrohotel.net/EssaysMigrant1.htm.
38. Lorine Niedecker to Louis Zukofsky, January 1961, quoted in Jenny Penberthy, “A Posse of Two: Lorine Niedecker and Ian Hamilton Finlay”, in Alec Finlay (1994) p. 17.
39. To be considered further in my biography. See also Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Castles”, in The Dancers Inherit the Party, unconnected with Orkney, but likewise referencing a haystack.*
40. For an illustrated history of the area, substantially derived from Tommy Gibson’s researches, see https://rousayremembered.com/nethermill-to-hurtiso/
41. A version in tapestry, woven in collaboration with Joanne Soroka c.1997, hangs in the Scottish Poetry Library.
42. Finlay, letter to Ernst Jandl, 14/1/65, in Hanneschläger (2017) p. 38, which includes references to John Sharkey, and his visit to Orkney.
43. Finlay, letter to Bann, autumn 1967, in Bann (2012) p. 42.
44. Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps (London: Penguin, 2025).
45. Bann (2012).
46. Author's interview with John Sharkey, Pembrokeshire, 2012.
47. Tommy Gibson first described the former pool to me, saying that he was one of only two people who knew it as "Kitty Pabbie’s Pow". I have not yet found the other, and curiously the feature is not referred to in Marwick (1947), although apparently it was known to many Sourin residents as “The Pow”.
48. Nicholas Sloan, email to the author, 2010.
49. Abrioux (1992) p. 241.
50. Edwin Morgan, “The Beatnik in the Kailyaird”, in Morgan (1974) p. 169.
51. Dom Sylvester Houédard, “Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay” in Spence (1963) p. 59, reprinted in Simpson (2012) p. 162. It was the “first article in English on concrete poetry”, Gustavo Grandal Montero, “Kincon Biobib: Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard,” ibid. p. 178.
52. Cf. “It’s not quite true that he ‘never left Orkney’ as has been held by journalists who used to think of him as living the exact same life as his crofter and fisherman characters.” Margaret Tait, “George Mackay Brown Remembered” in Joy Henry (ed.), Chapman No. 84 (Edinburgh, 1996).
53. George Mackay Brown, “New Poems by a Rousay Writer” The Orcadian (Kirkwall, 15/3/1962) p. 3.
54. Cf. Hall (2010): "Norse subject matter is preeminent in Orcadian fiction and poetry…” (p. 3); "The great mediaeval Icelandic prose work Orkneyinga Saga, written circa 1200, is the bedrock underlying all subsequent literature in the Orkney islands" (p. 9).
55. In 1953, for example, George Mackay Brown contributed a series of stories about “Mansie” to The Orkney Herald.
56. “Introduction”, in Bevan and Murray (2006) p. xii.
57. George Mackay Brown, “The Wireless Set”, in A Time to Keep and Other Stories (London: Hogarth, 1969).
58. See for interest: “We had very few visitors in Wyre, for the island was difficult to reach except in perfectly calm weather. Mr Pirie sometimes came across from Rousay to call on his parishioners or to hold a prayer meeting in the school. An auctioneer from Kirkwall, a jolly young man in a blue serge suit, came one wet, cold afternoon—he had some business at another farm—and gave me a sandwich, the first I had ever seen: he seemed to have a great number of them in his pockets. And a queer man in a soft, grey suit with a very high, stiff collar knocked at our door one summer evening. He spoke in a shrill voice with a thin, whining accent; he was extravagantly polite and amiable; but his face was dead white and jumped about so much as he chattered and giggled that I hid behind my father and peeped out at him from there. We did not know what to make of him, but after he had left Sutherland said that he was ‘moonstruck’—the adjective still used at that time in Orkney to describe lunatics. Rich young men who were not in their right minds were often sent to farms in remote islands then; a good number of them reached Orkney, and the Orkney people had a name for them, calling them ‘feeders’, since they ate without doing any work. The poor man who had called on us and tried to amuse us was a ‘feeder’ kept by a Rousay farmer who, wanting to give him a change, had rowed him across to Wyre to wander about there, and presently rowed him back again.” Muir (2000), pp. 51-52.
59. “Virgil discovered the evening./ Rousseau picked the first wild flower,” in “from A Book of Wildflowers,” in Alec Finlay (2012) p. 247; cf. Abrioux (1992) p. 241.
60. A notion, it has to be said, or a dream, rather than a worked-out proposal.
61. Sheeler (2009) n.p. See also IHF, "My Little Beat Mill in the West", in Outcry No. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1962), in Alec Finlay (2012), p. 127.
62. Quoted in Abrioux (1992) p. 2.
63. Alec Finlay, (2012) p. 267, n. 46.
64. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/finlay-la-belle-hollandaise-collaboration-with-herbert-rosenthal-p07454 (Footnote 64 refers to the information provided by Tate; the quotation in the sentence that follows is again taken from Jessie Sheeler's essay, in Boulton, 2009.)
65. Bann (2012) p. 49, and n. 33.
66. I am grateful to the poet Thomas A Clark, who knew personally both Ian Hamilton Finlay and John Sharkey, and explained the background to the duality implied by the phrase “The Wild Angel Boy.” See also “A Bohemian Visitor” in “Orkney Lyrics.”
67. Cf. “The irony and sophistication and literary reference take the poems long way from folk. One of the Dancers poems is called ‘Folk Song’, but it is self evidently not that!” Edwin Morgan, letter to Alec Finlay, 24/8/1995, in McGonigal and Coyle (2015) p. 410.
68. Finlay, note to “Poet” in Corman (1962) p. 3.
69. Edwin Morgan, “Finlay in the 70s and 80s” in Alec Finlay (1995) p. 137.
70. See also IHF’s screenprint Sea/Land, with Herbert Rosenthal (1967).
71. As suggested in the present writer’s 2026 screenprint, editioned at Soulisquoy Printmakers, Stromness, and associated postcard, “Orkney Interior”/ Homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay. Cf. IHF, in Abrioux (1992) p. 185.
72. Cf. IHF, “The Splash” in Chambers’s Journal, September 1956, pp. 570-572. Cf. Cockburn, "the equivalence of a northern boat to a Mediterranean fruit provides the seed for Finlay’s later ‘classicising’ of Scottish sea-fishing and indeed of Scottish landscape, at Little Sparta" (2004, p. xxiii)
73. Cf. Butterfield, Bulmer, Johnston, and Davidson (2021), passim.
74. Also, e.g., Finlay, Marine, with Patrick Caulfield, 1968 and "Lemons (netted)" with Peter Grant, 1977. Cf. Abrioux (1992) pp. 196-197.
75. Corman (1962) pp. 2-4. NB, the reference in the final sentence of the present paragraph to "Towards a World Language" as "[t]he third Origin poem" is a mistake. It should read "fifth", the poem appearing in ibid. on p. 6. Further, the letter referred to in the next paragraph is to be found therein on pp. 1-2.
76. Letter of 28/5/65 to Stephen Bann, Bann (2014) p. 52.
77. The farm’s original name is Woo, “O.N. á, river, stream” Marwick (1947) p. 95. “Oo” itself is a dialect term, also Scots, for “wool.” Cf. Lamb (1995) p. 85.

* With reference to note 39 above: