Clan Macnab

History

Macnab takes its name from the Gaelic Mac an Aba, 'son of the abbot'. Tradition names Abraruadh, lay abbot of the old church lands at Glen Dochart, as the clan's founder, and makes him one of the sons of Kenneth MacAlpin, the king credited with bringing Scotland's kingdoms together under one crown. Nothing this early can be checked against a document, and the clan's own historians treat it as tradition rather than fact, but it explains both the surname and the family's long association with the church lands around Strathfillan. Chiefs of the name are recorded from 1124.

The wars of independence hit the clan hard. In 1306 the Macnab chief sided with the MacDougalls of Lorn against Robert the Bruce, and after Bruce's victory at Bannockburn in 1314 the family paid for it, with their charters destroyed and their lands forfeited. Recovery took a generation. In 1336 David II granted a fresh charter, for the barony of Bovain in Glen Dochart, to Gilbert Macnab, who is reckoned the first chief whose position rests on solid record rather than tradition alone. Across the two hundred years that followed, the family's holdings spread out from Bovain to cover the whole of Glen Dochart, reaching west to Tyndrum and east along Loch Tay to Killin.

That country brought the Macnabs into a long feud with their neighbours the Neishes of Lochearnside, which came to a head at the Battle of Glenboultachan in 1522, near St Fillans. The Neishes were all but wiped out; a small remnant held on afterwards on an island in Loch Earn, from where, clan tradition says, they went on raiding their old rivals for years before the feud was finally settled. It remains one of the best-remembered stories clan members still tell of the family's Glen Dochart days.

The Macnabs backed the Crown in the civil wars of the 1640s, fighting for the Marquess of Montrose and the Royalist cause, including at the victory at Kilsyth in 1645. A century on, during the 1745 rising, the clan was less united: the 15th Chief, John Macnab, held a commission in the government's Black Watch and was present at Prestonpans, while other Macnab families, among them those of Inshewan and Acharne, came out for the Stuarts. Kinnell House, built near Killin around 1580, had by then become the chiefs' seat, a role it held from 1654 into the twentieth century.

The clan's estates were sold off piecemeal over the following two centuries, and Kinnell itself passed out of Macnab hands before returning to the chief in the twentieth century. James Charles Macnab succeeded his great-uncle as 23rd Chief in 1970. He kept up a busy round of visits to clan gatherings both in Scotland and abroad over the following decades, and the society's overseas membership grew substantially as a result; death duties then forced him to sell Kinnell House and most of the surrounding estate in 1978. His son, Jamie Macnab of Macnab, became 24th Chief on his father's death in 2013 and has carried that work forward, reviving the Clan Macnab Society his father had hoped to see re-established.