The Gobbins Heughs are cliffs on the east coast of Co Antrim, Mary Bell from Larne tells me. She asks about heughs and if heugh is native to Ulster.
The word originally came from Scotland and means, as Mary knows, I'm sure, a crag, a cliff. Burns has "An' tho' yon lowin heugh's thy hame, Thou travels far'.
Scott, knowing that your average Englishman, outside of the north country, wouldn't know a heugh from cow's hock, decided to explain it in Black Dwarf: "They descended the broad loaning [boreen], which winding round the steep bank, or heugh, brought them in front of the farmhouse." The word is alive and well in Scotland still, I'm told; to coup a person over the heugh means to ruin him.
But heugh has other meanings. In Borderland Muse (1896), a collection of verse from Northumberland I picked up long ago in Glasgow, I found the word spelled hewe: "Oor wierd wild hews, Oor cairn that mem'ry still embalms, Hae nursed my muse."
The English Dialect Dictionary tells me a hewe is a heugh, but that in the border country it means a glen, or a deep cleft in rocks. The late John Gallagher of Dunlewey, Co, Donegal, told me a heugh to him meant a pit, or the shaft of a coalmine. And sure enough, Wright's great dictionary quotes Graham's Writings (1883): "It was mirk as ina coal heugh."
The word is ancient. Douglas, in his Eneados (1513), has "Ontill ane cave we went, Vndir a hingand [hanging] hewch." The word is from the Old English hah, a promontory, literally a hanging (precipice). Travel even further and you take the Gothic hah, in faura hah, a hanging curtain.
Mary Kennedy from Artane in Dublin has been reading Yeats's Folk Tales of 1888. She wants to know what the great man meant by the noun term let-out; his sentence was: "It was to be a great letout entirely." All I know is that a let-out used to mean an entertainment on a large and lavish scale, the mother and father of a hooley. I take it to be from the Irish scaoil amach, or release, let out, set at liberty.