Clan MacKinnon

Clan MacKinnon, in Gaelic Clann Fhionghuin, is one of the small Hebridean clans that held land under the Lordship of the Isles. Its earliest reliable documentary trace is fourteenth and fifteenth century: an indenture of about 1354 between John of Islay, Lord of the Isles, and the Lord of Lorn stipulates that the keeping of Cairnburgh Castle in the Treshnish Isles was not to be given to any of the race of Clan Finnon, and Lachlan Macfingon witnessed a charter of Donald, Lord of the Isles, in 1409. The clan’s lands were the district of Strath in Skye — from which the chiefs took the designation “of Strathordell”, the area now called Strathaird — along with Mishnish in north Mull and the small islands of Pabay and Scalpay. Their strongholds were Caisteal Maol at Kyleakin and Dun Ringill.

The clan was consistently Jacobite. A hundred and fifty MacKinnons fought alongside the MacDonalds of Sleat at Sheriffmuir in 1715, and the elderly chief John MacKinnon brought out a battalion for Charles Edward Stuart in 1745. The clan’s best-known episode came after Culloden, when MacKinnons sheltered the Prince on Skye in early July 1746 and then ferried him across to the mainland for his escape. The chief was arrested and imprisoned, and the estates forfeited. The clan lost Strath in 1765 and Charles MacKinnon sold the remaining patrimony in 1791, leaving it landless in its own country.

The MacKinnon tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans holds an unusually rich set of MacKinnon records, including six dated historical variants — MacKinnon (1810), (1819), (1831), (1842), (1845) and (1930) — alongside the standard MacKinnon, a Dress sett and three Hunting setts. The early dates fall squarely in the Wilsons of Bannockburn and early-collectors period, when tartan was being commercially named and catalogued for the first time.

A note on honesty: MacKinnon Ancient and MacKinnon Weathered are not separate tartans. They are the same threadcounts woven in lighter or muted dye shades. And no MacKinnon sett has any documented existence before 1745: the idea of a fixed clan tartan did not exist before the Highland Society of London began collecting setts around 1815, and the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842 — a book now universally accepted as a forgery — supplied many of the patterns that later became official. The MacKinnons who hid the Prince in 1746 were not wearing a MacKinnon tartan as we would recognise one.

The clan’s descent from Fingon of the Dalriadic royal house of Alpin, and its nineteenth-century grouping among the “Siol Alpin” clans, is tradition rather than documented genealogy. So is the story of the chain across the narrows at Caisteal Maol.

Clan facts

References

1. MacKinnon tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. History — Clan MacKinnon Society
3. MacKinnons of Strathaird — Isle of Skye
4. The History of Tartan — The Scottish Tartans Authority