Watergaw.

My wife and I are watching the tenth season of Shetland (and looking forward to the eleventh, while mourning the recently announced departure of lead actress Alison O’Donnell), and I was delighted to see that one of the characters, a craggy and mysterious poet named Ed Tulloch, runs a pub called The Watergaw. After the show I read her the Hugh MacDiarmid poem of that name (which I’ve loved for over half a century now), and then I thought I’d investigate the word, which turns out to be not only interesting in itself but tangled up in the history of the poem.

The OED entry (revised 2015) says:

1. A secondary or imperfectly-formed rainbow; (more widely) any of various phenomena in the clouds and sky that are believed to be portents of approaching rain. Also in extended use. regional in later use (now chiefly Scottish). Cf. weather-gall n [“An imperfect rainbow, believed to be a presage of storm”].

1573 Like as a rocke that from a loftie mount doth headlonge fall, Enforst with rage of wind, or els with shoures, and water gall.
T. Twyne, translation of Virgil in T. Phaer & T. Twyne, translation of Virgil, Whole .xii. Bookes Æneidos xii. sig. Nnᵛ

1594 And round about her teare-distained eye Blew circles stream’d, like Rain-bows in the skie. These watergalls in her dim Element, Foretell new stormes.
W. Shakespeare, Lucrece sig. L2ᵛ

a1676 As the Water-gall is the Image, Shadow, or weak Representation of the Rain-bow.
M. Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (1677) 16

1744 False good news are always produced by true good, like the water gall by the rainbow.
H. Walpole, Letter 29 June in Correspondence (1954) vol. XVIII. 466
[…]

1824 There is also often seen a fainter coloured bow, commonly called a water-gall, above the Rainbow.
O. Gregory, Lessons Astronom. & Philosophy (6th edition) xxvi. 169
[…]

1913 From the treatment by Seneca there quoted it seems that this must refer to the broken rainbow or water-gall.
A. E. Bell, Study Nat. Sci. in 13th Century (M. Lett. thesis, Univ. of Calif.) 63

1925 I saw yon antrin thing A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht.
‘H. MacDiarmid’, Sangschaw 2

1998 Tunes that furled aroon his heid like the mist that wyved aroon Beinn a Bhuird, fan the wattergaw hung i the lift.
S. Blackhall, Bonsai Grower 61

I was of course pleased that they included the MacDiarmid quote; in the 1913 citation “this” is the word virga (why not include that, OED?). Sense 2 is “† A hydatid or other fluid-filled cyst, esp. in the liver. Cf. water bladder n. (a). Obsolete.”; 3 is “† An area of boggy ground. Obsolete.”; and 4 is the amusing “Perhaps: a flaw in a material or a manufactured article caused by the settling of water in a particular spot. rare. Inferred by New English Dictionary (OED first edition) (1923) from water-galled adj., but no evidence for this use has been found. Apparently only attested in dictionaries or glossaries.”

The etymology:

< water n. + gall n.² [“a sore or wound produced by rubbing or chafing”] (with sense 3, compare gall n.² 5 [“A bare spot in a field or coppice”]).

Notes
Compare Middle Low German wātergalle secondary rainbow, German Wassergalle any of various excrescences or sores on a person’s skin (a1541; 1460 in sense ‘stalactite or stalagmite’), watery bubble in the liver of swine (1587), secondary rainbow (17th cent.), flow in marble (1869 or earlier), the second element of which appears to show the cognate of gall n.², although some senses may show a different second element.

Much earlier currency of sense 3 is probably implied by the widely attested field name Watergall(e) (from the early 13th cent.), as well as by the following (it is likely that watergallis here represents the ablative plural of a post-classical Latin borrowing < Middle English):

1285 Cum toto prato suo falcabili, ut in capitibus, herbagiis, ranis, et watergallis.
in W. Brown, Yorkshire Deeds (1914) vol. II. 198 (note)

English regional water-gull (late 19th cent.), in sense 1, appears to show a folk-etymological alteration of this word (perhaps after gull n.³ [“A credulous person; one easily imposed upon; a dupe, simpleton, fool”]) rather than a variant of it.

As for the poem, Jamie Fairbairn wrote in a 2023 Facebook post (in the Association for Scottish Literature group):

I hadn’t realised that the line in Hugh Macdiarmid’s The Watergaw (1922): “There was nae reek in the laverock’s hoose that nicht” comes fae a saying aroon at the time, recorded onywye in Wilson’s Lowland Scotch (1915). I spotted yon entry efter an aul friend gave me his copy yestreen. I wonder if Macdiarmid had a copy.

Steve Byrne replied:

He did. Raymond Vettese points this out in Alan Riach’s “Scotland: The Promised Land” series. There’s a page of weather words in Wilson which has yow trummle, watergaw etc.

And James Robertson had this extremely informative response:

Aye, Jamie, as Steve’s already said, MacDiarmid creates that amazing poem from a few entries in close proximity in Wilson’s book (which is an impressive piece of work itself). Here is what MacDiarmid, writing under his real name C.M. Grieve, said about this experiment. In the Dunfermline Press on 30th September 2022, in a regular column called ‘Scottish Books and Bookmen’, he tells a strange story about a friend, visiting him in Montrose, who had taken down a book from his shelves. The book was Sir James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire (1915), and its pages, Grieve writes, were

‘still uncut when my friend discovered it in the corner of a book-shelf. I had forgotten all about it.…I have strong views in regard to the literary uses of the Vernacular which I have on more than one occasion expressed at length in this column and elsewhere in the Scottish Press. [These views were still largely negative – he was not interested in poetry in Scots if it merely reproduced more work in the style of, or addressing the same subject matters as, Robert Burns.] At the same time, I possess a great delight in words; and the obsolete, the distinctively local, the idiomatic, the unusual attract me strongly… My friend busied himself with the book, and a jotter and pencil; and later passed over to me the two sets of verses which I have pleasure in reproducing here. They serve a useful purpose, I think, in reducing from oblivion and restoring to literary use forgotten words that have a descriptive potency otherwise unobtainable. Not only so, but apart from that philological interest they have, in my opinion, some genuine poetical merit too.’

The ‘friend’ of course is his as yet unnamed alter ego. One of the poems referred to is ‘The Watergaw’, and the following month that poem appears in print under the name of ‘Hugh M’Diarmid’ for the first time, in the third issue of Grieve’s new journal, the Scottish Chapbook.

(“In the Dunfermline Press on 30th September 2022” must be wrong; I suspect it should be 1922.) Alas, the Scottish Chapbook does not appear to have been digitized, but you can see the contents of Vol. I no. 3 (October 1922) here. Wilson’s Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire has been, however (Google Books, HathiTrust); you can see “nae reek ee laivruk’s hoos” here (bottom of page) and “waatur-gaw” here (halfway down). What a wondrous thing the internet is!