yaird

plural yairds

1. ScotlandobsoleteObsolete form of yard.

   and in this equipage, with his little phizie (fusee) upon his shoulder, he marches to the church yaird, where the May-pole was sett up, and the solemnitie of that day was to be kept.

   1870, Sir Walter Scott, Old Mortality, A. & C. Black, page 425

   2 more examples

   On Tuesday, by the first break of day, he went over the street to his yaird barefooted and bareheaded, (as David did when he went up Mount Olivet, fleeing out of Jerusalem from his son Absolom,) he locked the yaird doore behinde him, haveing charged them that were in the house with Helen Gardener, the baillie’s wife, to attend her, sitting quyet besyde hir.

   1842, The Woodrow Society, Row’s History of the Kirk of Scotland, Edinburgh Printing Company, page 434

   A witness, Thomas Storie, said that Dalmahoy, with ‘a young woman Iron coloured of a high stature [i.e. tall] in common habit’, called at a neighbour’s house and asked for a drink of ale and enquired ‘if there was a yaird or any place for him and her to walk in’, and that they went to the yaird in question where Storie saw him ‘kissing and Imbraceing the said woman’.

   1998, Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684-1830, Edinburgh University Press, page 30