I had to go all the way to Brussels recently to hear a Hiberno-English word that had somehow previously escaped me.
As a group of Irish journalists walked down the Rue de la Loi one day, we were assailed by an unseasonably chill wind. Whereupon one of our number, whose accent I could identify only as being from the part of Ireland known as “down the country”, blamed something called the “scaraveens”.
The what, I asked? So she gave me a brief description of the term that involved sudden cold spells in late April and early May, ambushing the unwary who have been lulled into a false sense of security by previously mild weather. It had something to do with cuckoos, I gathered.
Back home, I went searching for “scaraveen” in dictionaries and newspaper archives, with little success. The term seems to have been unknown, for example, to the late Brendan McWilliams of this parish, whose long-running Weather Eye column was otherwise encyclopaedic on the eccentricities of Irish climate.
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Nor did Terry Dolan’s Hiberno-English dictionary feature scaraveen in the – generally disagreeable – section of his lexicon between “scallion eaters” and “sceachs”.
Scallion eaters are of course Carlow GAA teams, who have never done anyone much harm. But that part of the dictionary also includes “scanner” (“a rough, uncouth youth)”, “scaothaire” (“a bombastic talker, a windbag”), and the aforementioned sceach (Irish for the whitethorn bush and, by extension, “a prickly, tetchy person”).
But no scaraveen there either. Patrick Weston Joyce’s English As We Speak It in Ireland, meanwhile, was also silent on the matter. And not even the famously inclusive Patrick Dinneen’s Irish-English dictionary could help – the most likely root word there being “scarbh”, which means only “ford” or “cormorant”.
The problem, I finally realised, is that the “s” in scaraveen is, like the disrupted spring the word describes, a false start. The true Irish root is garbh, meaning “rough”, and more particularly garbh shionn, “rough weather”, which does indeed feature in Dinneen.
In Ireland, the supposed notoriety of early May once spawned a longer phrase, garbh shionn na gcuach (“rough weather of the cuckoo”), which in proverbs must have been preceded by the Irish “is”, now a vestigial consonant.
A recent Facebook video has a veteran Kerryman, Dan O’Flaherty, colourfully explaining the cuckoo’s responsibility for weather disturbances at this time of year, as a traditional punishment by Mother Nature of the birds’ bad behaviour:
“Because when they arrive they just feck the other birds out of their nests. So it [the scaraveen] was nature’s way of telling it to cop on to itself.”
Dan’s county appears to be the main home of the legend. Thus, among mentions in newspaper archives, I find one from the Kerryman on May 12th, 1978, in the opening paragraph of a report about a dog show in Cork:
“Despite the bitter cold ‘scaraveen’ weather at the Cork showgrounds, the Kerry contingent could feel well satisfied with their performance.”
But much more recently, in April 2024, a letter to the Irish Examiner by Tralee man Billy Ryle recounted how, emerging from his daily swim that morning, he had been jocosely warned by passing joggers: “Stay out of the sea at scaraveen, Billy boy.”
The great Michael Viney, also late of this parish, seems never to have mentioned the scaraveen(s), single or plural, either. Perhaps the concept did not extend as far north as Mayo.
The “May” chapter of his book A Year’s Turning concentrates on that month’s generally benign nature. But then, noting that it is not always so reliable, Viney veers into memories of two successively bleak Mays in the mid-1980s – part of washed-out summers that laid waste to whole crops and sometimes to the despairing farmers themselves.
Of “the second, miserable May”, in 1986, he recalled “all silage gone, the growth of grass postponed” and his neighbours having to buy hay, 20 bales at a time, every week until June. “The first tourists found a fresh greenness in the fields and a brilliant flush of buttercups; they were looking at silage meadows, grazed in desperation and mortgaging the growth of summer.”
Scottish meteorologist Alexander Buchan (1829-1907) once purported to find scientific evidence for short-lived weather disturbances at certain times of the year. May 9th-14th was one of his “Buchan spells”, now dismissed as random events.
But this month’s supposed treachery in these islands has also given us the well-known English proverb: “Cast not a clout till May is out.”
In the more benign interpretation, that refers to the May bush (our friend the sceach again), which is out already. To hard-bitten pessimists, it refers to the month, and cautions against casting off clouts (layers of clothing) until it’s over. Not that you’re safe then, either: the treachery of May being often succeeded, in Irish weather lore, by the treachery of June, July, and August.
