In Gatehouse of Fleet the short walk from the church, along the road to Barwhill and then back to Gatehouse via the War memorial is known as going roon ‘The Cape’. The derivation has always been a mystery until Stuart Nicholl told Margaret Wright about the ‘kep’ or sluice gate. The old expression he says was going roon ‘the kep’.
After the last spell of heavy rain, the garden at Barwhill [near the walk’s turning point] flooded slightly and a large hole appeared. Stuart Nichol, a local builder and dyker, told Margaret that a collapsed kep had caused
the flooding. He explained that kep is an old term for a type of sluice gate that held back water in the lade system—overnight, for example—before releasing it in the morning to power the mill. She suspects there was once a holding pond near Barwhill.
The water is part of the lade system from Loch Whinyeon. It runs alongside the road from Barlay Mill and then underground through the garden of Barwhill.
The water from here could either be sent on down to the large mill pond at the foot of the Cut (by the war memorial) and then down to the Birtwhistle Mills or it could be diverted off down the Cape Road to the Gatehouse/Fleet Farm next to the church.
Alan’s research into the word kep:
Gatehouse was established by the Murrays of Broughton and Cally in the 18th century as a would-be industrial city of water-powered mills and factories, there is a most complicated hydraulic system of lades still flowing down to town from that time. But how about this use of kep?
“Kep can be a Scots form for ‘keep’, also ‘cap’, and in some uses I suppose those senses overlap, to stem the flow of water. But for a sluice it’s pretty surely ‘a keep’. In SND under kep, there’s a wide range of verbal uses with senses of ‘catch’ and ‘hold, restrain’ (including local lad John Mactaggart, ‘to intercept, so as to catch’ Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopaedia ), though as a noun the closest sense, semantically and geographically, seems to be II n 2, ‘A contrivance for checking, stopping, or holding; a door-check (Sc. 1952 Builder (20 June) 942; Kcb. 1959), a catch for a latch, etc.”
So is this use of kep for a sluice a local usage, or is it known elsewhere in Scots? Might it have been a trade-term among dykers, millwrights and suchlike crafts, especially in places where large-scale water-powered industries enjoyed their short period of rapid progress in the late 18th – early 19th centuries?
“Kep!” would also have been a shepherd’s dog-direction, in SND, there’s ‘kep bye!, a shepherd’s order to a 
dog to head off sheep (Ayr. 1959′, ‘He “kepped” and “clapped” and “checked” at a word from the master he [a dog] adored’, and ‘If they war as keppie as catchie, they would make gude shepherd’s dogs’ (that’s from Mactaggart).
Margaret Wright and Alan James. September 2026