Clan Brodie

History

The Brodies take their name from the lands of Brodie, in the low country of Moray near Forres. Their early story is thin. The usual account has the family as hereditary thanes of Brodie, with a Michael de Brothie holding a charter from Robert the Bruce dated 1311 that converted the ancient thanage into a barony. Tradition adds a Pictish ancestry, and the name itself may relate to a Pictish personal name or to a Gaelic word for a muddy place. Neither idea can be proved.

Part of the reason is a fire. In 1645 Lord Lewis Gordon, the Catholic Marquess of Huntly, attacked Brodie Castle, set it alight and looted it, and the family's charters and papers were lost in the blaze. Much of what was written down about the earliest Brodies has been pieced together from other people's records ever since. It is a good reason to treat the older pedigrees with care.

The fire fell in a period of hard religious and political division. Alexander Brodie of Brodie, who lived from 1617 to 1680, was a committed Covenanter and sat in the Scottish Parliament. He is best known for his diary, which records his private doubts and his unease under Cromwell's rule. It remains a valuable window on Scottish religious life in the seventeenth century.

The castle you can visit today grew out of that earlier building. Its core is a Z-plan tower house dated to about 1567, which was damaged in the fire and later extended, including nineteenth-century work begun by the architect William Burn. Historic Environment Scotland lists it in Category A, the highest grade. Its grounds are also on the national inventory of gardens and designed landscapes.

The line of chiefs continued at Brodie into the twentieth century. Ninian Brodie, the 25th chief, passed the castle to the National Trust for Scotland, and sources differ on whether the date was 1978 or 1980. The Trust now runs it as a visitor attraction. The chiefly title, Brodie of Brodie, continues.

Tartan is less certain than the castle. The Register notes that, before about 1820, Brodies are said to have worn the Huntly district tartan. That fits a family living in country shared with the Gordons. The red-ground Brodie sett was first published in the Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842, and a hunting sett was recorded later in the century.