Clan Munro

History

Clan tradition holds that the first Munros were Irish soldiers who crossed to Ross-shire and were given land after helping a Scottish king see off a Viking raid. The clan's own name is usually explained as a form of the Gaelic bun Rotha, 'foot of the river Roe', a river in what is now County Londonderry. None of this can be documented. What can be shown is that a family known as of Foulis, in the parish of Kiltearn on the north shore of the Cromarty Firth, held land there as vassals of the Earls of Ross by the fourteenth century, and held it directly of the Crown once that earldom was forfeited.

The earliest chief who can be proved from contemporary record is Robert de Munro, who died in 1369; everything claimed before him rests on later tradition rather than evidence. His descendants built up their standing in Easter Ross over the following century. Around the middle of the fifteenth century, probably in 1452 though the exact date is disputed, a force of Munros and their Dingwall allies fought a hard action remembered as Bealach nam Broig against men loyal to the Mackenzies of Kintail, who were holding a Ross hostage. The Munros won the field and freed the hostage, but at heavy cost to their own number.

The Munros supplied Ross-shire's Barons of Foulis for generations, and in the seventeenth century many of them left home to fight as professional soldiers on the Continent. Robert Munro of Foulis, nicknamed the Black Baron, raised a company of some 700 men, all Munros, within a Highland Protestant regiment that entered the service of the King of Denmark in 1626 during the Thirty Years' War. When Denmark made peace, the regiment took service with Sweden instead, and a number of Munro officers went on to reach senior rank in the Swedish army.

In the Jacobite risings the Munros stood with the government. Sir Robert Munro, 6th Baronet of Foulis, was the first lieutenant-colonel of the Black Watch and had fought at Fontenoy; he was killed fighting the Jacobites at Falkirk Muir in January 1746, reportedly cut off from his men and overwhelmed by six Camerons. During the 1745 rising Foulis Castle itself was burned. Sir Harry Munro, who succeeded to the baronetcy, returned afterwards to find his home destroyed and rebuilt it in the mid-eighteenth century, working around what survived of the older tower house.

Clan Munro's chiefship is recognised by the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs and styled The Munro of Foulis. Foulis Castle remains in the family's hands. The tartan now regarded as the standard Munro sett has an odd history of its own: Wilsons of Bannockburn originally recorded it as a Cameron of Lochiel pattern, and how it came to be worn by the Munros is not clear. It is shown under the Munro name in two books published in 1850, and has been accepted as the clan tartan ever since.