shaugh

Noun

sheugh (plural sheughs)

1. (Ireland, Scotland) A ditch, especially a field boundary ditch usually used to drain fields and mark their boundaries.
   • The original ditches were created by digging trenches, as boundaries and/or irrigation. But to the English, the ditch is the trench. Whereas in Ireland, the ditch is the raised bank of earth and the hedgerow on top. (As for the trench, where I come from that’s a sheugh).2013 October 31, Frank McNally, “When Anglophone lines get crossed”, in The Irish Times, Dublin: Irish Times Trust, archived from the original on 14 Mar 2021
2. (Northern Ireland, Scotland, colloquial, especially coastal) The space between the buttocks.
   • The sweat is running down the sheugh of my arse.
3. (Ireland, colloquial) The Atlantic Ocean; the sea.
   • The Irish Sea is the little sheugh, the Atlantic is the big sheugh.

Noun

shaw (plural shaws)

1. (dated, dialectal) A thicket; a small wood or grove.
   • All this herd sire Lamorak / and on the morne sir lamorak took his hors and rode vnto the forest / and there he mette with two knyghtes houynge vnder the wood shawe1485, Sir Thomas Malory, chapter XII, in Le Morte Darthur, book IX
2. (Scotland) The leaves and tops of vegetables, especially potatoes and turnips.
   • Up here the hills were brave with the beauty and the heat of it, but the hayfield was still all a crackling dryness and in the potato park beyond the biggings the shaws drooped red and rusty already.1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (A Scots Quair), Polygon, published 2006, page 35

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