Clan MacRae

History

MacRae tradition traces the family to Clunes, near Beauly, where they are recorded from the thirteenth century as a small kindred with, it is said, roots further back in Ireland. The name itself is generally read as an old ecclesiastical one, something close to 'son of grace' or 'son of good fortune', which fits a family whose earliest known members appear connected with the church rather than with feuding or fighting.

In the fourteenth century a branch of the family moved west into Kintail, then Mackenzie country. The move is usually traced through Fionnla Mor nan Gad of Clunes, born around 1318, whose descendant Fionnla Dubh mac Gillechriosd, who died in 1416, is remembered as the founder of the Kintail line. The Mackenzies of Kintail, themselves not a large kindred at the time, welcomed the newcomers, and the MacRaes of Inverinate, the family's senior branch, trace their descent directly from Fionnla Dubh.

That welcome grew into one of the closest attachments in Highland history. From the early sixteenth century the MacRaes held Eilean Donan Castle, seat of the Mackenzies of Kintail, as hereditary constables, garrisoning it on the chief's behalf. Their loyalty in that role earned them the traditional epithet 'Mackenzie's shirt of mail'. One constable, the Reverend Farquhar MacRae, held the post alongside the charge of Kintail parish from 1618 until he was forced out by a rival Mackenzie in the 1640s, a reminder that the alliance was not always a smooth one even at its height.

MacRae fighting men were present at Sheriffmuir in November 1715, a battle still marked today by a memorial that the Clan MacRae Society of Scotland visits to honour those who fought there. Eilean Donan itself did not survive the Jacobite years: a Spanish garrison holding it in support of the 1719 rising saw it bombarded and blown up by Royal Navy ships, and the castle stood in ruins for close to two hundred years afterwards.

Without a chief of their own, the MacRaes had long looked instead to the Mackenzie Earls of Seaforth, and that gap came to a head in 1909, when Sir Colin MacRae of Inverinate petitioned the Court of the Lord Lyon to be matriculated as Chief of the Clan MacRae. Colonel John MacRae-Gilstrap, head of the Conchra branch, opposed the claim outright, arguing that no single MacRae family stood above the others. The Lord Lyon dismissed the petition, and the clan has been classed as armigerous, without a recognised chief, ever since.

It was that same Colonel MacRae-Gilstrap who, having bought the ruined island in 1911, spent the next two decades on its restoration before Eilean Donan reopened in 1932. His descendants remain its hereditary constables today, and the castle, held by the Conchra Charitable Trust rather than any government body, is the clan's most visible legacy. Clan MacRae societies in Scotland, Canada and North America now carry the name forward, gathering MacRaes and their kin without a chief to gather around.