A Scottish term for a treacherous pit, hollow, or waterlogged slough in a peat bog — the kind of soft, sucking ground that can swallow a boot whole and has claimed the unwary for centuries. Moss-hags are features of the Scottish uplands and the accounts of travellers, soldiers, and farmers who learned to read the ground carefully to avoid them. The term appears in Scottish literature and landscape writing as shorthand for wild, dangerous, uncultivated terrain.
The soldiers had to abandon the direct route across the moor because it was riddled with moss-hags hidden beneath the heather.
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(Scotland) A pit or slough in a bog.
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