Clachan noun a hamlet, village; an ale-house, an inn
‘“Aye, she’ll do me proud, I reckon … Now tell me what’s doing in the clachans?”’ (Outlander)
Clach is Gaelic for ‘stone’, and the suffix -an means ‘small’. Clachan in Gaelic, therefore, is ‘small stone’. So it is unsurprising that when the word is transferred into Scots, it has sometimes been used to refer to stepping-stones in a stream. In 1721, a writer in the Session Book of Rothesay (Isle of Bute), complained that ‘The broken claughans [were] hindring people’s attendance on the ordinance in stormie and especially rainy weather’.
However, when a word is taken (or borrowed, though it is rarely returned!) from one language into another, it often changes its meaning or takes on new ones. That has happened with clachan in Scots. The first citations in The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) are in early modern legal texts when it is used to refer to a hamlet or small village. The Edinburgh Testaments for 1606, for instance, refer to ‘The clachane of Glenluce’; while the Acts of the Scottish Parliament in 1581 refer to ‘Sum noblemen … passing to burrowis, townis, clauchannis, and ailhousis with thair houshaldis’. And the Muniments of the Royal Burgh of Irvine (1608) laid down a rule ‘That nane within burch keip liquere in ony clachan under the pane of xl lib.’ Clearly the good burghers of Irvine were keen to ensure that strong drink was discouraged. John Galt, in The Annals of the Parish (1821), thought that ‘the term clachan was beginning by this time [1795] to wear out of fashion’, but later writers have recuperated it. Sheena Blackhall, the Aberdonian writer, used the word in 1998: ‘“Ye can depend on Donald Ferguson”, the fowk in oor clachan eesed tae say.’
Some later records suggest that the term became more specialised. The great polymath Hugh Miller described how (in 1852) ‘We baited at the clachan of Kinlochewe - a humble Highland inn’, while Donald Mackinnon (1839-1914), Edinburgh’s professor of Celtic and a native of Colonsay, reported: ‘It used to be said that the three requisites of a Highland village were a church, an inn, and a smithy; hence the contextual use of clachan both for “the church” and the “public house”.’