- ring round the moon. This is a quite reliable indication that the weather is about to take a turn for the worse. Broch is the same word that is used for the structures, found in Orkney Shetland and the adjacent Scottish mainland, consisting of a round tower with inner and outer walls of stone. In fact, a broch can describe any circle or halo as in James Stewart’s lines from Sketches of Scottish Character (1857):
Wi draps o drink on Saturdays, there’s some gets roarin fou
There’s quarrelin, an crakit croons, an een wi brochs o blue.
Broch can also refer to a circle around the tee in a curling rink (a brocher is a stone between the rings) or a ring drawn on the ground for a children’s game of marbles, but its origin is Old English burh which gives us the modern word burgh, and so we find broch in the sense of burgh or town as in Robert Chambers’ Popular Rhymes, where we learn that
Musselbrogh was a brogh
When Edinbrogh was nane.
To anyone from the North East, however, The Broch means Burghead and Fraserburgh and Walter Gregor’s Folk-Lore of North-East Scotland (1881) claims that
Aberdeen will be a green,
An Banff a borough’s toon,
But Fraserbroch’ill be a broch
When a’ the brochs is deen.