PÌLL, 8, an old piece of cloth soaked and rotting. Pillean, idem. Pìll is also used for a wretched mangy unwashed sìliche of a man. Cha n-eil ann ach seana-phìll gun eireachdas, [he is only an untidy old wretch]. [Cp. A.D., p.74.]
Dwelly’s first meaning given for pìll is “cloth or skin on which corn is winnowed”.
Pìll is still understood in South Uist and Eriskay, for a sheet of canvas or similar outdoor material. Canvas, a pìll of cloth” said one [South Uist], “I big bit of cloth that you spread outside,” said another [Eriskay]. “It would be out of doors, they’d put a pìll on the surface of corn or something to keep the rain off it” [South Uist].
Màiri Thormoid in Eriskay has another interpretation though: “That they put a pìll on the bed – when duvets arrived it disappeared. Lewis people had plangaid, we didn’t have that at all, but pìll instead.”