Wirry-cow

Also Known As: also Worricow, Wirricow, Wurricow, Worriecow, Wirriekow, Worrykow, Wirry-cowe; from Scots wirry, to harass or throttle, plus cowe, a hobgoblin or object of terror
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A Lowland Scots bogey that frightens without ever settling into a fixed shape, applied variously to hobgoblins, the Devil, and anything else that terrifies.
Role in Mythos: It supplies the tradition with a general-purpose name for the frightening thing at the edge of the dark, rather than occupying a story of its own.
Relation to Humans: It exists to alarm travellers, children and anyone abroad after dusk, and the alarm is the whole of its work. Because the word could be turned on a neighbour, a Frenchman or a scarecrow, ordinary people used it as freely as an insult as they did as a name for a spirit.

On a Lowland winter night the sensible thing was to keep walking and keep your eyes on the road. Something stood at the edge of the stubble, hunched and patient, and it carried a name every child in the parish knew and no two adults could define.

Allan Ramsay put the word into print in 1711, describing himself hauling a dizzy head up out of a cornfield like a wirricow. The joke only lands because his readers already held the picture: something upright among the stalks that had no business being upright. Tobias Smollett had a character running about in the dark like one in 1757. Walter Scott gave it to a Border gossip in 1816, who reported that there were “a’ sort o’ worricows and langnebbit things about the land,” and that is as near a definition as the tradition ever produced. Long-nosed things. Sorts of them.

The second half of the name has been misleading English readers for two hundred years. It has nothing to do with cattle. Scots preserved an old noun, cowe, meaning a hobgoblin or simply an object of terror, and the same element sits inside the Northumbrian Hedley Kow and the nursery bu-kow used to hush children. The first half is worry in its older and rougher sense, to harass, to throttle, from Old English wyrgan, the ancestor of German wuergen. A wirry-cow is therefore a harassing fright, a bogey that comes at you. The Victorian antiquarian Charles Mackay preferred to trace the first element to the Gaelic uruisg, the shaggy Highland brownie, but the Scottish National Dictionary keeps to the plainer reading, and the plainer reading explains the whole family of related Scots insults: the wirry-hen for a rogue, the wirry-carle for a snarling man best avoided.

It could reach much higher than a hedge-bogey. In a piece printed with Ramsay’s poems in 1719 the wish is that a man be kept “frae the Wirricow After thou’s dead,” and whatever needs a creed to fend it off in the afterlife is not a goblin behind a dyke. Robert Fergusson in 1773 had warlocks louping round the Wirrikow, circling it the way a coven circles its master. Alexander Ross in 1768 described a woman shrieking at every gully and hollow as sorely as if she had seen the wirry-cow itself. For roughly a century the word carried the Devil’s weight, and it did so without ever acquiring the Devil’s biography.

Its origin is a matter of language rather than creation. No tale explains where the first wirry-cow came from, because the word arrived before any creature could be fitted to it, and the tradition never got round to the fitting. What survives instead is a handful of glimpses from writers who each imagined it privately. James Hogg, in 1818, set the woeful wirricowe in its dwelling with its haffats in a lowe, the side-hair blazing, which is the closest thing to a face the record offers. James Lumsden in 1908 made his hump-backed and bowed and scrimply four foot three, a small malevolent stoop of a thing. Neither writer was reporting. Both were reaching for the shape the word had left in their heads since childhood, and the shapes do not match.

Where it does step into a story, the story belongs to someone else. A Perthshire account from 1852 has a family recovering a stolen child by the ugliest method the fairy tradition permits. The good neighbours had taken Tammy’s bairn and left their own creature in the cradle, and they returned the child only once they got their worrykow back with, as the account puts it, such a hot skin. The changeling was tested by fire. It went home scalded, and the trade was reversed, and the word for the thing in the cradle was wirry-cow.

It also came loose from the supernatural altogether. John Galt in 1830 announced the arrival of a worricow of a Frenchman. S. R. Crockett in 1893 called a pack of scheming men the ill-contriving wirricows. Dictionary fieldwork was still recording it in Lanarkshire and Roxburghshire in the 1970s for a person of frightening or repulsive appearance, a sight, and by then it had settled comfortably onto scarecrows, which is a fair retirement for a bogey. Something similar happened at Goranberry in Liddesdale, where a cowie was said to have haunted the place for years. It is not recorded that anyone ever saw him. He was only heard.

That is the whole of its power and it is not a small one. A wirry-cow can be anything the dark suggests, which means it can be everything at once, and no farm road in the Lowlands was ever entirely free of it. It borrows authority from whatever it is set beside: put it near a warlock and it becomes Satan, put it near a cradle and it becomes a changeling, put it in a field and it becomes a stiff figure of straw and old coats that moves when the wind takes it.

Its limits follow from exactly the same fact. Nothing is recorded that will drive one off. No iron, no rowan, no running water, no rhyme, because a creature assembled out of a word offers nothing solid to strike and nothing specific to bargain with. It cannot be bound by its true name, since its name is a category rather than a person. It does not survive daylight or description, and it did not survive the language shift either. The dictionary’s last quotation is from 1908, by which time the wirry-cow was mostly a thing writers reached for when they wanted the sound of an older, more frightening countryside.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a wirry-cow?

A wirry-cow is a bogey of Lowland Scots folklore: a hobgoblin, bugbear, demon or generally frightening object. The word was applied loosely to whatever was terrifying, including the Devil himself, a changeling, an alarming-looking person, and eventually a scarecrow. It is recorded in Scots writing from 1711 through to the early twentieth century.

Does the wirry-cow have anything to do with cows?

No. The cow in wirry-cow is the Scots word cowe, meaning a hobgoblin or an object of terror, and it is unrelated to cattle. The same element appears in the Northumbrian Hedley Kow and in the nursery word bu-kow. The first half is worry in its older sense of harass or throttle, so the name means something like a harassing fright.

What does the wirry-cow look like?

There is no agreed appearance, because the word named a category of fright rather than a single creature with fixed anatomy. Individual writers supplied their own versions: James Hogg gave it side-locks burning like fire in 1818, and James Lumsden made it hump-backed, bowed and barely four foot three in 1908. The two descriptions do not match, and neither was reporting a settled tradition.

Was the wirry-cow the Devil?

For roughly a century it could be. Scots texts from 1719 onward use wirricow for Satan or for an imp of Satan, including a wish that a man be kept from the wirricow after death and a description of warlocks dancing around it. The word carried that weight without ever acquiring a devil’s biography or myth cycle of its own.

How do you get rid of a wirry-cow?

No defence against one is recorded, which sets it apart from most Scottish spirits. There is no iron, rowan, running water or rhyme prescribed against it, because a bogey built out of a word offers nothing solid to strike and no true name to bind. In practice it dissolved under daylight, under description, and finally under the decline of the Scots vocabulary that carried it.