“I think he’s jist thrawn, there’s nae benefits o stooks ower big roond bales.”
Translate:
stooks: tied bundles of cut straw (sheaves) stacked – as in 10 to 12 lent against each other – in groups with the grain to the top in a field to dry. The binder pulled by the horse that cuts and binds the crop can be seen in the background. The one I knew had been adapted to be pulled by a tractor.
“I think he’s just very very stubborn, there is no benefit of stacks of sheaves over big round bales.”
The Scottish Word: stook with its definition and its meaning illustrated and captioned with the word used in context in the Scots language and in English.
Not a particularly Scottish word. I know it from my childhood in Ontario, Canada, when we were still using a binder and threshing machine on the farm. For us, a stook was eight sheaves. It was a lot of working stooking an entire field of grain.
It is a Scottish word. I’ve helped my grannie on a convent farm where they still had the old machinery – outdated even then (1960s) – and I’ve sat inside the stook imagining it was a wee house. Happy days. And for all we know we could be related. My grannies maiden name was Scott and several of her siblings emigrated to Canada in the early 1900s no doubt taking all these words with them. I never enquired of who was who but I have the photographs sent back from when they settled. You could have great great grandparents and a great grandparent in this photograph for all we know.
I remember seeing the horse and binder working in the fields, stooks being stacked,
hay stacks being pulled on to a bogey and hitching a ride to the stack-yard. This was in
County Durham the early fifties. Thanks for taking me back!