- the sound of this word seems particularly appropriate for the name of a watery place, and in the far north of Scotland and the Northern Isles it denotes a sea-cave or chasm. In The Orkney Norn (1929), Hugh Marwick notes that the term is used specifically to refer to
a deep chasm or pit a little way back from the cliff-edge, but having an opening to, or connexion with, the sea down below. Looking down into the gloop one may see the sea dashing about in the bottom. A gloop is thus a big cave, the top of which has fallen in at the inner end.
Gloups can have supernatural connections, as in Robert Menzies Fergusson's Rambling Sketches in the Far North (1884):
This idea [that the elves were melancholy] probably originated from the moaning sound made by the wind and waves in the geos and gloups where they were supposed to dwell.