Extracts from "The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen 1650-1784" by Bruce Lenman

[Chapter 1 - 'The Environment and the Clans']

….Along the north shore of Loch Eil there has always been an important east-west route which at Glenfinnan, at the head of Loch Shiel, offers access to the coastal districts of Arisaig, Morar, and, down the long narrow waters of Loch Shiel, Moidart. It is no accident that in the late summer of 1745 Prince Charles Edward Stuart, who had come from France via the Hebridean isle of Eriskay, anchored off the shore of Arisaig on 25 July, St. James's Day, in Loch nan Uamh, and went on to raise his standard on 19 August at Glenfinnan, after sailing up Loch Shiel to the rendezvous on the level sward of the little delta at its head. Since he had no clear idea of what would happen, he was admirably placed for either an advance or a withdrawal. There are other lochs and glens which, like Loch Eil, link up from the west with the sequence of lochs along the line of the Great Glen Fault. Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, and Loch Ness, each an ice-scooped rock trench in alignment with the main direction of the fault, have such western approaches.

Few of these are in fact east-west routes comparable to Loch Eil. Loch Arkaig, whose waters drain into Loch Lochy through the short River Arkaig, is a case in point. Cameron of Lochiel, whose original residence seems to have been a defended islet in Loch Eil, and then a fortalice on a rocky knoll beside the River Lochy at Torcastle, moved his home after 1651 to Achnacarry on the River Arkaig. At the western end of Loch Arkaig two glens, Glen Pean and Glen Dessary give access respectively to south Morar and to north Morar and Knoydart, all on the western seabord. However these ways are even now rough bounds rather than well-trodden routes, and this is even truer of Glengarry, much of which is occupied by the length of Loch Garry, and which empties its waters into Loch Oich, the smallest of the Great Glen Lochs, at Invergarry. Heavily wooded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ringed by mountains, several of them over 3,000 feet high, Glengarry and its westward extension Glen Quoich, was a fastness rather than a passageway. The same is true of the more northerly of the two western side glens of Loch Ness, Glen Urquhart, which runs out to the loch near Drumnadrochit. The imposing mass of Urquhart Castle on a promontory jutting out into Loch Ness has a long history. As a royal fortress it dates from about 1200. James IV of Scotland repaired it and gave the lordship of Urquhart to John Grant of Freuchie. Plundered in the mid-sixteenth and again in the mid-seventeenth centuries, it was partially blown up in 1691 to deny its use to Jacobites. By 1715 it was a picturesque ruin, so much so that it was reported with some slight exaggeration that 'the Castell of Urquhart is blowen down by the last storme of wind'. Its real function latterly was to control the upper reaches of the twenty-three or so miles of deep-water communication represented by the loch and its northern extension known as Loch Dochfour.

The one exception to all this is the strategic Glen Moriston, which drains into the southern part of Loch Ness at Invermoriston. From the head of Glenmoriston there is an excellent route by Loch Cluanie into the sharp defile of Loch Shiel, crowned on its northern side by the glorious mountain ridge known as the Five Sisters of Kintail. The River Shiel runs into Loch Duich whence there is a clear passage by the waters of Loch Alsh either to the Minch, the stretch of sea between the Inner and Outer Hebrides, or more nearly to the Isle of Skye. Alternatively, from Invershiel it is possible to traverse the pass of Mam Rattachan and to reach the township of Bernera opposite the south end of Skye and adjacent to the old-established crossing from Kyle Rhea on Skye to Glenelg. It is no accident that the decisive battle in the brief Jacobite rising in 1719 was fought in Glen Shiel, as a small army of Scottish exiles and clansmen, reinforced by some regular infantry of the Spanish government which was sponsoring the episode, began rather tentatively to take the track leading via Glenmoriston and Loch Ness to Inverness. They were defeated by a force of British troops under General Wightman moving in exactly the opposite direction along the same strategic corridor. General Wade built a small barracks at Bernera on the north side of Glenelg Bay, to keep an eye on the crossing to Skye, though cynics have argued that the only useful purpose this hopelessly weak post ever served was when, as a ruin in the nineteenth century, it sheltered the victims of the particularly ruthless Highland Clearances in Knoydart.

On its eastern side Glen More, in contrast to its northern and southern ends, is remarkable mainly for its long history of inaccessability, rooted in the topography of the area. The hills soar up suddenly and dramatically, presenting formidable problems for communication from the east. Notoriously, when in the eighteenth century a military road was driven from the east over into the centre of Glen More, it had to climb to 2,500 feet by means of a series of zig-zags at the Pass of Corrieyairack, thereby presenting to the Jacobite army of Prince Charles in 1745 an idea position of defensive tiers of musketry fire. General Cope, in command of the Hanoverian forces and already deeply demoralised by the absence of any serious support for his troops even among Whig clans in the Highlands, almost certainly spared his men decimation when he decided not to force the position, but to make for Inverness by forced marches.

The conspicuous exception to this general pattern of inaccessability is the broad, historic corridor of Glen Spean, branching eastward from Spean Bridge and traversed by a river far more turbulent before 1934, when Loch Laggan, which lies east of the glen was dammed and extended by four miles. Here is the main eastern approach to the lands of Lochaber at the south end of Glen More. That the first skirmish of the '45 should be near the strategic outlet at Spean Bridge was not entirly coincidental. The area could not be avoided even by the Royalist army of the Marquis of Montrose in the severe winter of 1644-5 when it escaped from an apparent trap in Glen More between the Earl of Seaforth's army of 5,000 at Inverness, and Argyll's Campbells at Inverlochy by a brilliant flanking march. From the south end of Loch Ness it climbed up Glen Tarff and then down Glen Roy to where it debouched into Glen Spean at Roy Bridge, before its final march across Leanachan towards Inverlochy and bloody victory. In the other direction, Glen Spean broadens out after its own thirteen or so miles into the braes of that district of the Highlands known as Badenoch whence there is easy access to the headwaters of the River Spey and the broad corridor of Strath Spey down towards Moray and the north-east of Scotland. To preserve the clans of Glen More from the great territorial magnates of these two last districts, it was necessary that the principal clans of Glen Spean and upper Strath Spey should act as guardians of the eastern approaches.

As we shall see, that is precisely what the MacDonalds of Keppoch and the Macphersons did. They really belonged by nature to the smaller human groupings characteristic of the extremely dissected mountain terrain of the central and western Highlands, where the forces of earth-sculpture such as glaciation have carved the high-level plateau of 2-3,000 feet in height, still to be discerned over extensive parts of the eastern Highlands, into a myriad of narrow glens and narrower lochs. Where earth movements have left 'shatter belts' in the rocks, glaciers in the ice ages have often scooped out very long and very narrow lochs, of which perhaps the most extreme example is Loch Ericht which lied between Perth- and Inverness-shires, fifteen miles long and never more than half a mile wide. It is a monument to glacial action comparable to the famous 'parallel roads' of Glen Roy, markings of remarkable regularity picked out by the bent grass which grows on them in contrast to the heather and bracken of the main slopes. The 'roads' are in fact successive levels of the shrinking margins of a sub-glacial lake. Even when the last ice age finally cleared from the western Highlands ten thousand or so years ago the area was left exposed to vigorous earth-shaping influences such as heavy rainfall. Very large parts of the territories which were inhabited by the clans which are central to this study have rainfalls well over a hundred inches a year. Theirs was a beautiful, but harsh and deeply divided, natural heritage.

If however we turn to the clans which inhabited the Great Glen and its principal eastern approach in the sevteenth and eighteenth centuries, we run at once into the difficult question of the nature of Scottish clans………The clans of the early modern period were the product of a fusion of older tribal and Celtic influences with the incoming structures of Anglo-Norman feudalism. Anglo-Norman families and feudal relationships were deliberately imported into Scotland by the kings of the Canmore dynasty, partly to toughen their realm against risk of attack from Norman England, and partly to gain access to the techniques of feudalised warfare which would enable them to commit successful aggression against independent communities as far apart as Galloway in the south-west, and Moray in the north. Although feudalisation had to be carried out with tact and without excessive violence to local prejudices north of the Forth Clyde line, it is quite clear that the Highland line posed no serious barrier to this process whatsoever. The fusion of feudal and Gaelic tribal influences became pervasive in the Highlands. The precise nature of the balance within any given synthesis varied a great deal. In that sense one cannot really talk about a 'clan system', only about specific clans, and though generalisations are possible, exceptions may be found to all of them. For example, it is generally true that the feudal influences were more potent in the eastern Highlands, where a magnate like the Earl (later Marquis and Duke) of Atholl could wax mighty without in any significant sense being a clan chief, and that the tribal influences were more important in the west. Yet the Macleans, often thought of as a united western clan with Maclean of Duart or Dowart as its chief, never functioned as a unit. They were divided into two main branches, the Siol Lachlan (the race of Lachlan) and the Siol Eachann (the race of Hector), each of which was in turn divided into three branches. The race of Lachlan comprised the branches of Duart, Ardgour, and Coll; that of Hector those of Lochbuie, Kingairloch, and Dochgarroch. Apart from the last named, which was isolated among strangers at the northern end of Loch Ness, the heads of the branches often chose to cooperate and intermarry, but always by free choice, for to them their separate identity was as important as tribal solidarity.

Broadly speaking, feudal structures gave a clan chief a valuable set of mechanisms to help him run his clan. Even chiefs like Mackintosh of Mackintosh, whose very name showed that he was originally a pre-feudal royal official with the rank of toiseach, found it useful to adopt feudal forms for the rule of the Clan an Toisich, 'the children of the toiseach'. Above all, feudalism meant feudal courts, starting with the basic baronial jurisdiction, but extending up to the mini-kingdoms known as regalities, normally composed of a group of baronies. A regality was created for the Grants on Speyside after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which they supported, and we shall witness the glee of a Lord Fraser of Lovat when he finally vindicated his rights to a regalian jurisdiction within his ancestral clan territories. A Gaelic chief with a feudal court could not only discipline his clan but could also use feudal law to move towards a concept of individual ownership of land, and to establish succession by primogeniture in his own family. Both concepts carried within them seeds of tension for an older Gaelic heritage undoubtedly inclined to view the right to control land as residing in the settled community of those who farmed it. The MacDonalds of Keppoch had no other claim to their clan lands. Equally a female heiress marrying outwith the clan could threaten its survival.

On the other hand, if seventeenth century people by and large accepted the vicissitudes of heredity as the raw materials of politics, they were never as abjectly or automatically at the mercy of indeseasible hereditary right as some of their modern admirers would like to think. It was for men to interpret and rightly apply the often ambiguous opportunities provided by the accidents of succession. The MacLeods of Dunvegan used a royal charter to transfer the estates of an heiress to an uncle, the heir male. The Gordons simply made an heir by marriage called Seton change his name to Gordon, and in all clans it was important that the leading branches should intermarry, and that the marriage plans of a female heiress should be controlled by kinsmen. In the period of this study the Clan Fraser was reduced to turmoil and guerrila warfare when aggressive outsiders tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to commit a sort of genetic kidnap of the chiefly authority. Only with the restoration in 1715 of the true male heir of the name of Fraser was the situation normalised again, and that because he was in the last analysis the preferred candidate of the leading Frasers.

Another romantic illusion best confined to coloured 'clan maps' sold to tourists, is that Highland clans necessarily consisted of solid blocks of people with the same surname and, of course, a common descent. Common descent with the chief is a palpable nonsense when the peasantry were of ancient Celtic stock, and the chief of Norman descent, as is the case with a couple of clans important in this study. Besides, surnames were a luxury not much indulged in by the Highland peasantry until quite late. People were identified by patronymics and nicknames. All Highland clans were normally happy to incorporate promising recruits from outside the clan area, and when surnames became commoner in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries humbler men, and some not so humble, were in the habit of changing their clan name with their circumstances. People moved around and cooperated across clan lines. For example in 1699, only seven years after the massacre of Glencoe, the records of the Justice Court of Argyll show a Glencoe MacDonald or MacIan forming with a Canpbell cousin from Kilmartin a robber band which eventually consisted of four Campbells, two MacIans, and a Cameron, with a view to plundering forays in mid-Argyll. More sobering still is the fact that the judicial proceedings taken against those Argyll men who followed the Earl of Argyll into rebellion against James VII and II in 1685 reveal that only a minority of them at that late date were called Campbell.

For many political purposes clans were their chiefs and the leading clan gentry of his name. Below that level could lie a very mixed and indeed changing population. Clan rivalries could be bitter. If they existed they could be assiduously fanned by the chiefs and their fuglemen, the Gaelic bards who, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century were often performing the sort of public relations exercise for their patrons which Edmund Burke conducted, in prose and English, for the Rockingham Whigs in Westminster politics in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, there is evidence, all of it entirely creditable to the Highlanders of all classes concerned, that the levels of inter-clan bitterness declined sharply in real terms in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries…………

…………..Clan Cameron was intercepted before it could join the Royalist invasion of England in 1651………..

…………..During the spectacular defeat of the Earl of Argyll in 1685, when he rose against James VII and II, the Marquis of Atholl led a royal army into Argyll, of which he had been made Lieutenant. Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel joined him with 300 of his clansmen. Atholl from the start suspected Sir Ewen of complicity with Argyll and after the notorious affair of Ard Rannach, where a night patrol of Camerons accidentally killed some of Atholl's Perthshire horse, he would have liked to arrest all the Camerons. He was dissuaded by a council aware that Macleans and MacDonalds were preparing to help the Camerons resist. That Lochiel was accused of giving information to Campbell spies may tell us nothing about Lochiel, but it tells us a lot about how contemporaries viewed his relations with Clan Campbell.

Intelligent Scottish politics, not tribal blood-lusts rooted in wars of religion, were the guiding principles of most Highland chiefs. We shall see later that in 1715 the chiefs of the central Highlands tacitly refused to embark on destructive inter-clan warfare in Argyll at the behest of the Earl of Mar………..

………….South of Glengarry lay Lochaber, the domain of the formidable Clan Cameron, led by the Camerons of Lochiel. Like the Frasers, the Camerons were, by the standards of the Great Glen clans, a biggish unit. There is no point in pretending that we know with any degree of precision what the populations involved were, but their order of magnitude may be suggested. There are repeated statements, for example, that the Keppoch MacDonalds were composed of 160-170 households, which has led to informed guesses that the whole clan on the Braes of Lochaber amounted to a little under a thousand people. From what we now know about the size of early modern nuclear families in Britain, that would appear to be a reasonable estimate. Smaller units which feature in our story could be much smaller. The MacDonalds of Glencoe seem to have been scattered over 30-40 households, suggesting a population of a few hundreds. Bigger clans like the Frasers and Camerons, given the area of their territory, say in the case of the Frasers 500 square miles at the very most, and that of very mixed character, cannot have been more than a few thousands strong. A population base of 6-7,000 followers made a chief a major power in the Highlands. Once, however, populations reached these proportions, they tended to lack homogeneity. Simon Fraser, reigning Lord Lovat, would in the 1730s and 1740s actually reward tenants with a meal if they would adopt the name of Fraser, in order to manufacture a sense of solidarity and kinship among his followers.

Clan Cameron was the product of a broadly similar process of integration. The precise origin of the chiefly family is itself obscure. They take their Gaelic title from a fourteenth-century character called Donald Dubh, from whom is derived the patronymic Mac Dhomhnuill Dhuibh (son of the black-haired Donald). Whether that gentleman was connected with the Anglo-Norman family of the Camerons of Ballegarno in Fife is ultimately a matter of opinion. What is clear is that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the most important tribal groups in Lochaber were the Clan Donald, the Clan Chattan (itself a confederacy), and the Maelanfhaidh, a group consisting of three main tribes; the MacMartins of Letterfinlay, the Macgillonies, and the MacSorlies of Glen Nevis. By marriage to a MacMartin heiress, the redoubtable Donald Dubh began to emerge as a successful overlord in Lochaber. After the triumph of Robert the Bruce in establishing the independence of the Scottish kingdom in the early fourteenth century, he rewarded one of his faithful followers, Mackintosh, chief of Clan Chattan, with lands in Badenoch, thereby setting in motion an emigration of Clan Chattan from around Loch Arkaig; from Glen Gloy (to the east of Loch Lochy); and from Glen Spean. Camerons moved into Loch Arkaig and Glen Gloy, while Keppoch MacDonalds occupied 'Brae Lochaber' in Glen Spean. So despite unquestionable rights to these lands from first the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, and then the Scottish monarchs, successive Mackintoshes grappled with an insoluble squatter problem.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, with the Camerons led by the formidable and long-lived Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, there was little prospect of Mackintosh re-establishing himself in Lochaber.. In 1665 he accepted monetary compensation from Lochiel, who was offered a loan for the purpose by the Marquis of Atholl. In fact Sir Ewen preferred to borrow the money from Argyll. After 1665 the only question at serious issue between Lochiel and Mackintosh was how far away Mackintosh power could be pushed by means of the Keppoch MacDonalds and the Macphersons…………

………….The Glen More clans and their outliers had by that date [1724] evolved into a stable system held in place by resistible tensions. Balance was the key to the survival of clan identities, which were effectively a form of local self-government. After the final forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in 1494, no great power threatened from the west. They could live with Clanranald and the Stewarts of Appin. To the south the menace of the Campbells of Argyll baulked at such tough rival warlords as the Lochiels. To the north the Frasers wrestled with the southern thrust of Clan Mackenzie. To the west Keppoch and Cluny checkmated Mackintosh. Even within the Great Glen the clans and the British army lay in balance……..