Hoick/Howk verb to dig or pull
‘He hoicked Jemmy up onto his shoulder like a bundle of laundry…’ (The Fiery Cross)
We find this word in its earlier form holk in northern Middle English from the late fourteenth century. The first occurrences in Scots are from Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid (1513), where he uses it to refer to undermining a crumbling turret to fall upon the attacking Greeks: ‘We holk and mynd the corneris’.
Howk, in the sense of dig up, is often used of the potato harvest or tattie-howkin (also seen as tattie-hoicking). An early record of digging up vegetables is from the Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall (1665): ‘He may go doune to the yard and houck out carrots’.
There are many howking references from the mining industry, and slate quarrying gets a mention too in the Scots Magazine (1951): ‘In one of the quarries on the island men still howked slates, and fishermen still go in search of lobsters’. Less laboriously: ‘Ye can howk i’ the kebbuck [cheese] an’ howk again As lang as there’s kebbuck to pree [try by tasting]’. (D David Rorie, The Auld Doctor, 1920.)
Howk can also mean digging out information. David Thomson provides a charming figurative example in Musings Among the Heather (1881): ‘When mem’ry houks auld stories up, Our lives begin anew’.
Burns’ line from Address to the Devil (1786): ‘And in kirk-yards renew their leagues, Owre howket dead’ refers to the nefarious doings of witches and warlocks in graveyards at dark of night, but Auld Hornie and friends weren’t the only ones to be howking up the dead. Covering the history of the grave-robbers stealing bodies to advance medical knowledge, Alistair Heather writes in The Body Snatchers (2008): ‘Students fae aa the ancient universities … sterted gangin aboot digging up bodies fae the local kirkyairds. They’d howk them oot, dicht [clean] them aff, than cut them up for tae ken better hou the body wirked.’ Apparently, this is the reason some Scottish graveyards have such high walls…
Finally, a less gruesome, well-known graveyard tale gets a mention in Blackwood’s Magazine (1834): ‘He will lie upon his master’s grave, and … howk wi’ his paws.’ A reference to the faithful heart of Greyfriars Bobby.