- to be choked, stifled, suffocated, to suffer or die from want of air especially to perish by being buried in a snowdrift.
James Hogg, the writer known as the Ettrick Shepherd, in The Shepherd’s Guide (1807) had little sympathy for shepherds who allowed their sheep to die in the snow. He says that smooring: is occasioned solely by the shepherd’s not having his flocks gathered to proper shelter. Nevertheless, it seems to have happened often enough and according to John Hunter’s The Retrospect of an Artist’s Life (1868), The year of the Big Snaw (1795) had its histories of smoorings of sheep.
Sometimes the shepherds themselves were the victims; Robert Wilson (1822) tells of How shepherds smoor’d amang the snaw.