Wha will bend up the brags of weir?”
The dance of the kirn or harvest home was always danced with peculiar glee by the reapers of the farm where the harvest was first finished. On these occasions they danced on an eminence in full view of as many other reapers as possible, to the music of the Lowland bagpipe, commencing the dance with loud shouts of triumph and tossing their hooks in the air. The dance was retained for a time by Highlanders visiting the South of Scotland as harvesters, but it has now been more than a century in disuetude. In a poem of great antiquity, called Cockilby’s Sow, which describes such a dance, we are told that—
“Davy Doyte of the dale,
Was thair mad menstrale,
He blew on a pype he
Maid of a borit bourtre.”
Also that—
“Olarus the lang clype
Playit on a bag pype.”
In a manuscript of the seventeenth century, a song descriptive of shepherd life says—