Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 56

Gaelic-speaking Scots believed that the soul stayed close to the corpse until after burial, so they introduced the custom of the Late Wake, watching the body constantly until burial, lamenting and singing, and even dancing and playing games: wakes were not necessarily somber or sober affairs. Anne Ross, in Folklore of the Scottish Highlands (Tempus, 2000), reports that ‘At the funeral of one of the lairds of Culloden the mourners were entertained so liberally before leaving Culloden House that when they did start for the Churchyard of Inverness they left the coffin behind! At another funeral a similar mistake occurred, and was only discovered when the party arrived at the churchyard and the sexton remarked, “It’s a grand funeral, but whaur’s Jean?”’

Some areas had their own death customs: in Soay, for example, a lock of the dead man’s hair was nailed to the door lintel to keep the fairies out. Some clans and families had special traditions, especially surrounding portents of death, for example, the Breadalbanes knew a family death was coming when they heard a bull roaring on the hillside at night, and for the MacLachlans, the appearance of a small bird foretold doom.