A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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roarie-bummlers
Noisy blunderers — storm clouds, loud and clumsy, rolling in over the hills. A Scots word that turns weather into character.
Etymology
Scots: roarie (roaring) + bummlers (blunderers, bumblers, or dawdler—from Scots/English usage related to German bummler, for stroller, loafer).
Notes
In the Scots imagination, storms do not simply arrive—they come lumbering over the hills. Roarie-bummlers are great racing clouds, “noisy blunderers” that barrel across the sky ahead of bad weather. The word appears in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain glossary and was revived by Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks as an example of language that gives weather a personality.