mawn

plural mawns

1. ScotlanddialectalA maund; a basket or hamper.

   An apple-mill and press had been erected on the spot, to which some men were bringing fruit from divers points in mawn-baskets, while others were grinding them, and others wringing down the pomace, whose sweet juice gushed forth into tubs and pails.

   1887, Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, Harper & Brothers, page 173

1. Peat.

   […] the wastes made impassable by crevasses; the mawn-pits that could swallow a man and his mount before either was aware of them.

   1932, Francis Brett Young, The House Under the Water: Volume 1, page 103

   4 more examples

   […] there lived, high up the breast of one of the loftiest mountains, in a hut among the black mawn-pits, - the world of human haunts in soundless depth below, above her only the cloud, the crag, the kite, - a melancholy woman[…]

   1837, The Tale Book: 1st Series, page 59

   […] mawn pits on a distant part of the Common. It is a bad mawn harvest this year in consequence of the wet summer and what with the dear coal and bread and meat and the diseased potatoes, I don't know what the poor people will do.

   2013 April 18 [1870-79], William Plomer, Kilvert's Diary 1870-1879 - Selections from the Diary of the REV. Francis Kilvert, Read Books Ltd, →ISBN

   There are some extensive mawn pits near this village, from whence the inhabitants procure their chief fuel: it is cut up and harvested in the summer, and with a little wood makes a very good fire.

   2005, Mark Willett, An Excursion from the Source of the Wye, page 56

   […] throughout the mawn pools and larger bogs of Radnorshire but the largest numbers in Wales are found in the old county of […]

   2010, Roger Lovegrove, Iolo Williams, Graham Williams, Birds in Wales, page 83

plural mawns

1. A ghost.

   None of the natives who had come in the boat would touch the body, or even go near it, saying, the mawn would come; that is literally, ‘the spirit of the deceased would seize them’.

   2006, Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, University of Adelaide, archived from the original on 10 Oct 2010, page 7