The thing that killed the cobbler's wife...the last...from me on tattie howking before we all end up skellie eyed! (Cross-eyed) As I replied to Kristy's enquiry: ...the Twentieth Century Chambers Dictionary, published in Edinburgh, has this very short definition: howk (thereby howker) means to dig, burrow; an earlier word was hoke, so maybe this is why Sam Heron explained that in the Wigtownshire dialect the word howker is pronounced as hoker. Howk has its roots in L.G. (Low German) holken Donald and Len's further "expositions" were interesting, too. I may have mentioned this before that friend Olive McDonald, such a knowledgable Wigtown lister, has a somewhat Irish inflection, but the relatives I spoke with in Auchencairn, Kirkcudbrightshire, though country folk, spoke with what I would consider to be a typical south of Scotland dialect and vocabulary I suppose tattie howking by schoolchildren from Glasgow was an emergency situation during the war. We gathered the potatoes alongside Italian prisoners of war and women farmhands...and could those women scoop up the totties/tatties! After the novelty wore off of trying to keep up with the potatoes being "howked" by the horse and harrower (or whatever it was called), it became very "old" as we could never quite keep on top of so many potatoes lying on the surface of the now flattened rill/drill no matter how quickly we tried to throw them into the wicker basket. Again, if it was raining and the mud was adhering to the potatoes, that was even harder work. Three weeks of that hard graft was enough for this city slicker! For lunch, we generally ate sandwiches with our backs to the field's wall...no way to wash our hands or take care of nature's needs, except to jump over the wall! On a couple of occasions we were given lunch in a farmhouse...and such memories of that spotless kitchen with its pipe-clayed floor, with the men at one table and us lassies at another! To this day I don't remember if we thanked the farmer's wife for that delicious soup. We had dinner back at our digs prepared by a local woman. I re-discovered her daughter many years afterwards and she filled me in some more on life at King's Grange. We were "billeted" in this large house, the King's Grange, a bus ride away from Castle Douglas. The last I heard a few years ago was that it was still in private hands and had not been converted into "flats" or a condo. My father's father was born in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire as was his grandmother, but how they ended up in Auchencairn, Kirkcudbrightshire, I don't know. The patriarch of this lot, William Clint, born 1792, Carlingwark/Kelton, was an agricultural worker. He lived until he was 96 and if he did any tattie howking in his younger years it seems not to have hurt him. Most of my father's people from Wigtownshire/Kirkcudbrightshire were agricultural workers and dairymaids. Others were involved with horses, one driving a coach and four which seemed to somehow impress my Glasgow mother! He was also an accomplished artist, with one of his oil paintings presently hanging in Auchencairn House. We in Glasgow, believe it or not, were always impressed with the seemingly more independent and healthful way of life of my father's relatives in the south. Must have been so as they all lived well beyond the national average...though my Glasgow born and bred mother lived until she was 92! Maisie