Love Joins the Clans

Author’s NoteThe feuds between the Clans are a great part of the history of Scotland. The last great Clan battle was fought between the MacDonalds and the Mackintoshes at Mulroy in 1688, but violent quarrels and braeside murders survived and the old way of life in the Highlands was largely unchanged. The Chief was still the father of the Clan with the terrible powers of his ancestors. There was no alternative to his protection and no appeal against his authority. In the seventeenth century, a Clanranald Chief would punish a thief by tying her hair to the seaweed on his coast and leaving her to drown in the Atlantic tide. In the eighteenth century the English, having conquered the Scots, realised the supreme and unequalled fighting ability of the men from the Highlands. The raising of the Highland Regiments was instrumental in the creation of an Imperial Britain. One of the first Regiments mustered by Simon Fraser of Lovat, Chief of the Clan, contained men who had fought at Culloden, while some of them died with James Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham in Canada. During the next fifty years the Crown drained the Highlands of young men. In the French Wars at the turn of the century, the Highlanders supplied the British Army with the equivalent of seven or eight infantry Divisions. They were a unique and splendid Corps united by a courage and loyalty unsurpassed by any other Regiment.