Note 145 — Chapter V · The Line of Atholl.

Tigh. An. Ult. 1045. The flight of Duncan’s children—mere infants—one to Cumbria, the other to the Isles, is a fiction founded on the ideas of the time when it first appears, three or four centuries later. They probably remained amongst their hereditary partizans in Atholl and the southern provinces, occupying the same position which their cousin Lulach had done during the reign of their father—the position of the Head of the Hy Nial, when Brian Boru achieved the sovereignty of Ireland; or of a Duke of Bavaria or Austria, in the olden time, when another magnate had been elected to the empire.