Clan MacRae

Clan MacRae, in Gaelic MacRath, carries a name meaning son of grace or of luck, and older writers took it to mark men held to possess more than an ordinary measure of sanctity. The clan appears in Kintail in the first half of the fourteenth century, having come west from the Beauly district, and settled around Loch Duich and Lochalsh with houses at Inverinate and Conchra. Their history is bound to the Mackenzies of Kintail and to Eilean Donan, the castle on its tidal island at the meeting of three sea lochs. The castle’s own timeline dates the MacRaes as its Constables to 1511, and they garrisoned it for the Mackenzie chiefs from then on; other accounts put the constableship a decade or so later. The Reverend Farquhar MacRae, born in 1580, became vicar of Kintail and Constable of Eilean Donan in 1618, and was eased out in the years after 1640 by Simon Mackenzie, leaving without regret on the grounds that an island was a poor habitation for a man of his age.

Three episodes fix the clan in the record. In 1539 the MacDonalds of Sleat besieged Eilean Donan, and Duncan Macrae is credited with the arrow that killed their chief. At Sheriffmuir on 13 November 1715 the MacRae companies from Kintail and Lochalsh stood on the left wing of the Highland army and, as the memorial puts it, fell almost to a man; the Clan MacRae Society raised a cairn on the field in 1915, two centuries later, inscribed in Gaelic and English to the MacRaes killed there defending the royal house of Stuart. In 1719 a Jacobite rising backed by Spain left a garrison of Spanish marines in Eilean Donan; three Royal Navy vessels bombarded the castle on 10 and 11 May, stormed it, and over the following days destroyed it with twenty-seven barrels of gunpowder. The rising ended at Glen Shiel on 10 June 1719. The castle lay ruined for nearly two centuries until John MacRae-Gilstrap bought it in 1912, the first MacRae in many years to hold land in Kintail; reconstruction ran from 1919 to 1932, and the castle was formally opened on 22 July 1932. Separately, Duncan Macrae of Inverinate compiled the Fernaig manuscript of Gaelic verse between 1688 and 1693.

The MacRae tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans returns twenty results for MacRae, and four of them are attributed to Wilsons of Bannockburn, the Stirlingshire firm whose pattern books supplied the tartan trade from the late eighteenth century. Those four are MacRae itself, MacRae (Red), MacRae Hunting (Wilsons’) and MacRae of Ardentoul. That is an unusually strong documentary footing: most clan tartans trace only to a Victorian book, whereas the MacRae setts trace to a named commercial weaver with dated pattern books.

The remaining sixteen are later work. D. W. Stewart recorded a MacRae Hunting, MacGregor-Hastie another, and Gary and Deas a fourth. D. C. Dalgliesh of Selkirk designed MacRae Dress Purple, Tartantown Ltd produced dress dance setts in purple and red, and Moffat Weavers a fashion sett called Heather MacRae. There are records for MacRae of Conchra, MacRae of Inverinate, MacRae Special Hunting, MacRae The Prince’s Own and MacRaes of America.

A note on honesty: not one of those twenty records is called MacRae Ancient, MacRae Modern or MacRae Weathered, because those are not tartans. They are dye recipes applied to the same threadcount — strong chemical shades, the paler tones sold as an imitation of old vegetable dyeing, and muted colours meant to look weathered. The twenty records are also not twenty ancient distinctions. They are what happens when a well-known Highland name meets two centuries of weavers, dance schools, societies and export markets, each adding a variant. Being a Wilsons pattern makes the core MacRae sett better documented than most, but Wilsons were a commercial firm selling to the tartan revival of the decades after 1745. The MacRaes who died at Sheriffmuir in 1715 did not wear it.

Clan facts

References

1. MacRae tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Clan MacRae
3. Timeline — Eilean Donan Castle