Some say the Gearran is the month before St. Patrick’s day O.S., others fourteen days before it and fourteen days after, i.e. before and after 29th March.
A Chailleach, the old wife.
This old wife is the same as the hag of whom people were afraid in harvest, the last done with the shearing had to feed her till next harvest, and to whom boys bid defiance in their New-Year day rhyme, viz.: “The Famine, or Scarcity of the Farm.” In spring she was engaged with a hammer in keeping the grass under.
“She strikes here, she strikes there,
She strikes between her legs,”
but the grass grows too fast for her, and in despair she throws the hammer from her, and where it lighted no grass grows.
“She threw it beneath the hard, holly tree,
Where grass or hair has never grown.”[62]
Trì làithean nan ōisgean, THREE HOG DAYS.
In the rural lore of the south of Scotland, the three hog days are held to be the last three days of March, and to have been borrowed by that month from April (Brand, ii. 42). Dr. Jamieson (Etym. Dict. of Scot. Lang.) says, “Some of the vulgar imagine, that these days receive their designation from the conduct of the Israelites in borrowing the property of the Egyptians.”