Note 267 — MEMORIAL CONCERNING THE HIGHLANDS WRITTEN BY ALEXANDER MACBEAN, A.M. MINISTER OF INVERNESS

The story of the transference of the lands of the ancient and powerful family of Macleod of Lewis to the Mackenzies is one of the most pitiful in Highland history. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, Roderick (or Ruari) Macleod, the last undisputed Macleod of Lewis, married, as his first wife, a natural daughter of John Mackenzie of Kintail. The wife eloped, the son, named Torquil Connanach, was repudiated. Torquil was brought up at Strath Connan (hence his ‘to-name’) by the Mackenzies, who embraced his cause. From that moment the family of Lewis was doomed. Partly by purchase, partly by marriage, but largely by intrigue and violence the lands of Macleod were acquired by the Mackenzies. Lewis was driven to anarchy; feuds of the worst type ensued, father against sons, brothers murdering brothers. Government interfered; Lewis was forfeited and parcelled out among Lowland colonist-adventurers, who were thwarted by the Mackenzies, and at last were glad to go, and in 1610 to dispose of their rights to Mackenzie, who had become Lord Kintail the previous year. Any rights that remained to his cousin Torquil Macleod were made over to the Mackenzies. Meantime, in 1605, Kintail’s brother Roderick had married the daughter and heiress of Torquil, and became possessed of the mainland property of Coigeach. As soon as the Mackenzies obtained the island, they promptly restored order; the remaining members of the old Macleod family were murdered or driven out under a commission of fire and sword. Kintail’s son became an earl in 1623, and took his title from Loch Seaforth in Lewis, while his uncle Roderick, tutor of Kintail, terrible and ruthless (of whom the Gaelic proverb says ‘there are two things worse than the Tutor of Kintail, frost in spring and mist in the dog-days’), built a castle in Strathpeffer, which he called Castle Leod, and when his grandson obtained the earldom of Cromarty in 1685, the second title then assumed was that of ‘Lord Macleod,’ to show that the heritage of the old family of Macleod of Lewis remained with him.