This time I’m going to concentrate on gangrel, which is a fine Germanic word. Both words feel as if they’re Gaelic, don’t they? But stravaig is Latin in origin, a cut-down rendering of extravagate, “to wander”, which will perhaps be the focus of another post. Use should be sparing-anyone who puts them both in the same sentence is liable to incur mockery.
But nowadays, any hill writer who uses gangrel or stravaig is aiming for a particular effect-a sort of couthy, misty-eyed harking-back to a Golden Age of Scottish hill-walking. Its original meaning is “to stroll or wander aimlessly”, but again under Brown’s care it became a positive thing-the sort of thing gangrels do. Brown also introduced many of his readers to the word stravaig. How did it come to acquire this new meaning? I don’t know, but there was a fashion among hill-writers of Brown’s generation (and among his predecessors) to resuscitate and repurpose Scots words-I suspect a close examination of back-issues of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal would cast a lot of light on the subject. There’s no doubt that Brown cemented this particular usage of the word gangrel into the minds of a generation of walkers.
Brown was the first to complete this feat, and his book has been pretty much continuously in print ever since. Brown’s book, describing his continuous, self-propelled round of all Scotland’s Munros (hills over 3000ft), was hugely popular among Scottish hill-walkers. In Brown’s vocabulary, a gangrel is the very model of a hill-wanderer, someone to be admired and respected-in contradistinction to its original meanings, all of which to some extent reflect the implications of the -rel suffix, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “diminutive and depreciatory”. Brown uses the word gangrel fourteen times in his classic book, and always with approval. There aren’t any topographic features called s gurr (a pointed peak) in the vicinity, but Brown’s description, black sgurr, certainly fits the ridge of Creag an Duine, which looms across the loch from Coiremor bothy, where he was spending the night. Hamish Brown, Hamish’s Mountain Walk (1978)īrown is talking about Loch a’ Choire Mhoir, above-an out-of-the-way spot tucked around the back of Seana Bhraigh, one of Scotland’s more out-of-the-way hills. Only the real gangrel penetrates this remote corrie with its shivering waters and black Sgurr. Gangrel (noun): a vagabond, vagrant or wandering beggar a lanky, loose-limbed person a toddler (Scottish hillwalking: a person who wanders far among the hills) Source
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