Clan MacIntyre

Clan MacIntyre, in Gaelic Clann an t-Saoir, takes its name from Mac an t-Saoir, “son of the carpenter”. The clan’s heartland was Glen Noe in the parish of Ardchattan, on the north side of Loch Etive under Ben Cruachan in Argyll, where the MacIntyres settled from the Hebrides and were established by about 1300, holding their ground from the Campbells of Glenorchy and later the Campbells of Breadalbane. The origin story is a good deal less firm than the geography. Tradition makes the founder Maurice Mac Neil, a kinsman of Somerled, who bored holes in the galley of Olaf the Red and then plugged them with wooden pegs, forcing Olaf’s consent to Somerled’s marriage to his daughter; from this he was called An t-Saoir, the Carpenter. A competing version has the founder cutting off his own thumb to stop the leak. None of it is documented, and the founding story is clan legend, not history.

What is recorded is more prosaic. The chief fought at Inverlochy in 1645 alongside the Campbells. In the rising of 1745 MacIntyres served in the Appin regiment, and ten of the name were casualties at Culloden in 1746. In the same months Duncan Ban MacIntyre, born at Druim Liaghart in Glen Orchy on 20 March 1724, was at Falkirk in 1746 on the other side, serving in the Campbell of Argyll Militia; he lost his sword there, wrote a satire about it, and later composed Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain. He died in 1812. Separate MacIntyre families were hereditary pipers — the MacIntyres of Rannoch to the chief of Clan Menzies, another line to MacDonald of Clanranald. The famous Glen Noe rent, a snowball fetched at midsummer from a corrie on Ben Cruachan together with a white calf handed over with ceremony, is treated by the sources as tradition and not as record; the Ardchattan parish archive calls it plainly “a tale”. The payment was commuted to money rent, which the Breadalbane Campbells raised until the chiefs could no longer meet it. They quit Glen Noe in 1806 and emigrated to the United States in 1822. The chiefship then lay vacant until 1991, when the Lord Lyon confirmed the arms of James Wallace MacIntyre of Glenoe.

The MacIntyre tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans returns seven records for MacIntyre. The principal sett is recorded not as “MacIntyre” but as No.157 or MacIntyre, credited to Wilsons of Bannockburn, the Stirlingshire firm whose pattern books supplied the tartan trade from the late eighteenth century. A second Wilsons pattern is recorded as Glen Orchy or MacIntyre #1, and the Register files it under District rather than Clan/Family. The remaining records are later and mostly unattributed: MacIntyre Hunting and MacIntyre and Glenorchy carry no designer at all, MacIntyre (of Gatehouse) is credited to Smith of Mauchline, MacIntyre, Inglis is marked Unknown, and MacIntyre & Thomson Ltd is a corporate tartan recorded in July 2022.

A note on honesty: the name of the main sett gives the game away. It entered the record as No. 157, a stock number in a weaving firm’s pattern book, and acquired the MacIntyre name afterwards. Wilsons numbered their patterns and attached clan names to them as the market for named tartans grew after 1745; the sett is a commercial weaving-trade design of that period, not a garment the clan wore in Glen Noe. No MacIntyre tartan in the Register carries a date earlier than the Wilsons books, and the Register lists no designer and no date for MacIntyre Hunting. MacIntyre Ancient, Modern and Weathered are not three tartans. They are one threadcount woven in different dye shades, and the Register holds no separate entry for any of them.

Clan facts

References

1. MacIntyre tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Members — The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs
3. MacIntyre — Ardchattan Parish Archive