TO a Lowland Scot (particularly from Ayrshire), the term ''bard' has vaguely facetious connotations, especially when applied to Burns. ''Bard should be barred,'' one has fumed on occasion.

Now this classy paperback restores the term to a proper dignity. The bards who talk here with candour and a rare eloquence about their lives and creativity are not chieftains' acolytes but simply members of their communities, with a natural ability to make songs and poetry.

They are, at the same time, the direct descendants of a tradition of oral poetry-makers that stretches back to pre-Christian Gaelic society. That these poets are so largely unsung is a pity. This book should remedy that.

They tell their own life stories - none more typical than that of 72-year-old Donald MacDonald of South Uist. His croft consists of ''four acres plus the hill: a few sheep, no path to the door, and 10 lifetimes of peat just two hundred yards over the burn.''

The physical austerity of Hebridean life is matched in these Highland and Island poets by a refinement of thought and feeling. It's extraordinary to think of them as youngsters, Gaelic their first language, being drilled in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Sir Walter Scott et al, before quitting school at 14, as most did.

The religious certainties of Free Church faith are a central factor for many. But there is nothing insular or parochial in the subject matter of their poems. In his Tales of the Ceilidh House, Donald MacDonald roams the centuries from the days of the Viking longships to the Great War of the Kaiser ''that left hundreds of thousands in the cold sacrifice of death''.

The remarkable poem to Ben Eubhal that gained Mary MacLean the bardic crown at the 1951 Mod flies imagin-atively back to the Creation

and the Crucifixion in its powerful argument.

Among the most poignant testimonies is that of Margaret Begg. She talks of her brother, Murdo MacAskill, who survived years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp with humour and dignity, read the New Stateman and Nation, worked as a roadman, wrote thoughtful verse, and baulked at social inequality.

Seeing his handsome, quiz-zical face and the archetypal dignity of his poet peers, one wonders what worldly heights they might have reached with higher education. Even in

translation they reach heights with words.

Lesley Duncan