Bad place
June 27th 2026
The bad place has a succinct, one-word definition in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) – “Hell”.
One early example comes from a complaint letter in the Perthshire Constitutional & Journal in February 1850. The subject of the letter was a local petitioner who, having failed to gain signatures from a household, rudely asked the nursemaid at the doorstop, “Do you want to go to the bad place with your master?”.
The following evocative description of the bad place comes from a mischievous boy within William Black’s Highland Cousins (1894): “They’ve got him in the Bad Place, and ye’ll hear him crying for help, away down below. And I’ll show ye where it is, and there’s flames and brimstone, and little devils running about wi’ their pitchforks, and the Big Devil too, and he has fire coming out of his mouth”.
Hector MacGregor’s poem The Souter’s Lamp (1903) provides a rather harsh example: “Deil’s Bairn, yer grannie’s in the bad place noo”.
In June 1936, the Dundee Courier noted: “An imitation of the bad place is how a complainer described the noises emanating from Riverside Park, Dundee, in a letter to Chief Constable Neilans”.
Lastly, in August 2001, the Herald commented on the state of that day’s racing: “As for this afternoon, it may be possible to search from now until the bad place freezes over and never unearth a more diverse collection of animals than those scheduled to compete in the conditions race at Ayr this afternoon”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
