Clan Colquhoun

History

Clan Colquhoun takes its name from a stretch of land on the north bank of the River Clyde, near Dumbarton, rather than from a Gaelic forename — one of the reasons historians tend to place it among the Lowland clans rather than the Highland ones. By clan tradition the story starts around 1241, during Alexander II's reign, when the Earl of Lennox made a grant to a man called Humphrey de Kilpatrick covering not just Colquhoun but Auchentorlie and Dumbuck alongside it. A generation on, his son Ingram is remembered as the one who let the family's old surname go and took a new one instead, borrowed straight from that same patch of ground.

For over a century the family held Dunglass Castle, a stronghold on a rocky point above the Clyde, and later generations of Colquhoun lairds served as keepers of the nearby royal fortress at Dumbarton. The clan's centre of gravity shifted north and west around 1368, when Sir Robert Colquhoun married the heiress of the barony of Luss, on Loch Lomond. The match brought substantial new lands into the family, and within a century — a charter of 1457 folded the older Colquhoun holdings into a single free barony of Luss — the chiefly style had settled into "of Colquhoun and Luss," which the family still carries.

The clan motto, Si je puis, is said by clan tradition to go back to 1424, when James I ordered Sir John Colquhoun to retake Dumbarton Castle from the Earl of Lennox. According to the story, Colquhoun answered the king with those words, then lured the castle's garrison out by staging a stag hunt past its gates so his men could seize the walls while the soldiers gave chase. It is a good tale, and it sits neatly alongside the stag's-head crest the family still bears, but like a great deal of clan lore it survives as tradition rather than as a documented event, and is best read that way.

The clan's grimmest chapter came on 7 February 1603, at the Battle of Glen Fruin, a few miles inland from Luss. A running feud with Clan Gregor over stolen livestock boiled over into open battle, and the Colquhouns were routed, with well over a hundred of their men left dead on the field. The defeat had consequences far beyond the glen: an outraged James VI, moved in part by an account of the Colquhoun dead being paraded before him in Edinburgh, had the MacGregor name proscribed outright, banning it for close to a century and a half.

The clan's symbolic home today is Rossdhu, on a low headland jutting into Loch Lomond. The medieval castle that once stood there was replaced in 1773 by the Georgian mansion of Rossdhu House, built for Sir James Colquhoun, and the house still stands as the family's traditional seat, even though the wider estate is now run as a golf club. The Colquhoun baronetcy of Luss was created in 1786, and the family has held the clan chiefship alongside it ever since. The present chief, Sir Malcolm Rory Colquhoun of Luss, 9th Baronet, succeeded his father in 2008, and the Clan Colquhoun International Society continues to gather members with the surname and its variants from around the world.