Clan Morrison

History

Morrison is not one story but three. In the Outer Hebrides the name belonged to the hereditary judges of Lewis. On Pabbay, off Harris, it belonged to a family of smiths and armourers. On the Scottish mainland, quite separately, Morison (often with a single r) simply meant son of Morris, with no link to the islands. Anyone tracing a Morrison line needs to work out which of the three they come from. The Gaelic name, Mac Ghille Mhoire, is usually given as son of the servant of Mary, a naming pattern once common among Gaelic-speaking families devoted to the Virgin.

The island Morrisons have a striking foundation legend. Tradition holds that an infant called Gille Moire, son of the Norse-Manx king Olaf the Black, was swept ashore on Lewis after a shipwreck, saved by clinging to driftwood, and grew up to found the family. The Clan Morrison Society calls its own version romanticised and admits none of the rival origin stories can be proven. At least one Morrison historian goes further, arguing Olaf has no real link to the name and that Morrison only became the family's surname around the 1630s. That driftwood is also the clan's plant badge, though the society's own materials give the word both as driftwood and as driftweed.

What is documented is the office the family held. From at least the fifteenth century until the early seventeenth, the Morrisons served as brieves, hereditary judges, for Lewis, first under the Lords of the Isles and then under the MacLeods. Their base was Habost, near Ness at the island's northern tip, and Dun Eistean, a tidal sea stack close by, is remembered locally as their stronghold. Excavations run from the University of Glasgow in the early 2000s supported the tradition, finding the stack had been used as a refuge and a working base of power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with stores of weapons and food.

The office did not survive the fall of the MacLeods of Lewis. Uisdean, or Hugh, the brieve of the day, is said to have lured the MacLeod chief Torquil Dubh onto a wine-laden ship and handed him to the rival Mackenzies, who beheaded him in 1597. Feuding followed, worsened by King James VI's attempts to plant outside settlers on Lewis, and the Mackenzies eventually took the island. The Morrisons lost the brieveship in 1613, and letters of fire and sword were issued against them in 1616. Some sixty families are said to have moved to Durness, in Mackay country on the Sutherland mainland, which is why the clan's tartan echoes the Mackay sett.

The Harris Morrisons took a different path. On Pabbay they worked as hereditary smiths and armourers to the MacLeods of Harris, and it is this family, not the Lewis brieves, that the present chiefs descend from. Mainland Morisons have their own, unconnected history: families of the name held Prestongrange and Dairsie by the sixteenth century, and the Morisons of Bognie in Aberdeenshire, established in 1635, claim the longest unbroken Morrison line in Scotland.

A clan society was founded in 1909 to give the scattered name a chief once more. In 1965 the Lord Lyon recognised Dr John Morrison of Ruchdi, of the Pabbay line, as Chief of the Clan and Name of Morrison, confirmed by a grant of arms in 1967. The chiefship has passed father to son since: to Dr Iain Morrison in 1974, then to the oceanographer Dr Ru Morrison, and, on his death in 2020, to the present chief, Alasdair Morrison of Ruchdi, the first American-born chief of the clan.