Sweelin the moors

You may have read of the terrible moorland fires on Saddleworth Moors on the border between Lancashire and Yorkshire, just above where we used to live. There’s another fire on Winter Hill which seems to have been started by an arsonist. Although both these conflagrations are terrible, at least there doesn’t seem any danger to human life, although no doubt many animals and birds will not have escaped.

A wildlife ranger I know wrote this:

There’s a huge amount of arson on nature reserves and wild spaces all the time. Most of them burn out or are quenched before they cause serious damage, but some get way out of control. A great deal of my time as a wildlife ranger in various parts of the country, has been spent putting out fires!

To which I replied:

It’s extraordinary (I was talking about arson)… sometimes modern moorland management with a hands off approach doesn’t help. There used to be what was known as sweeling up on the Saddleworth Moors, controlled burning to make the moors safer from fire – we used to see it every year!

I suddenly wondered if ‘sweeling’ was an actual word or whether I had misremembered/misheard/made it up… but no, it is an actual Lancastrian word. I came across it in a book called ‘Dialect of South Lancashire or Tim Bobbin’s Tummus and Meary” by John Collier. This seems such an interesting book, and as I lived in Lancashire for over thirty years and I was married there and both my children were born there, I’m quite tempted to buy it!

Looking up ‘sweeling’ I came across these other words… can you guess what they might mean?