Quern noun a hand-mill for grinding
‘And it was always there, the knowledge that Ian was dying, grinding like a quern, slow but relentless, wearing away the nerves.’ (An Echo in the Bone)
Quern stones are the large, circular stones used all over the world for milling grain. Smaller, hand-held versions were used to grind pepper, mustard seeds etc. ‘He’d querns for grindin’ either meal or snuff.’ (Charles Murray, Hamewith 1900). George Mackay Brown uses it this way to draw a vivid picture of rural life in Greenvoe (1972): ‘The ox, the plough, the seedjar, the harrow, the sickle, the flail, the quern, the oven, made a great circle of fruition.’ So too this more homely description from Old Caithness Croft (John O’ Groat Journal, 7 April 1916): ‘In the early harvest when meal was scarce a sheaf or two was taken home, thrashed, the corn dried in an old pot and ground in a quern. The hot meal was called “bursten,” and with new milk was splendid.’
Quern has several meanings in Scots, but they all relate (either figuratively or literally) to the milling sense, so by extension quern also means very small things - such as seeds or grains themselves. David Gilmour uses it that way in Reminiscences of the Pen Folk (1873): ‘Before asking the blessing, she placed the sugar mug in her lap; and if … any daring urchin tried to abstract a quern while her eyes were closed, a finger and thumb caught the intruder.’
There are some interesting compounds too, such as quern-furlot - an annual fee paid to a mill-owner for grain, which was probably also measured in querns (meaning here an amount or proportion). Quern chants are songs sung whilst milling. A quern’s ee [eye] is the hole in the middle of a quern stone and is used to denote something very small.
In people’s homes, querns were allotted specific spaces known as quern-binks or quern-ledders. ‘On the ben side of the gable, and in the centre of the wall, there was a recess called the quern-ledder or quern-bink, where the burstin’ and the malt made from bere [barley] were ground.’ (1911, Old-lore Miscellany of Orkney, Shetland etc.)
Finally, a person who carved quern stones once rejoiced in the title quern-pecker.