CHIEF:  Alastair Ivor Gilbert Boyd 7th Baron Kilmarnock

Richard G. and Jerri Lynn Boyd

568 W. Friedrich Street

Rogers City, Mich. 49779

The Highland Clans of Scotland, Eyre-Todd

"It is now well understood that the Celts originally came out of the east. Guest, in his "Origines Celticae" describes the routes by which they streamed across Europe and along the north coast of Africa in a bygone century.  The migration did not stop till it had reached the shores of the Atlantic.  The Celtic flood was followed within the Christian era by the migrations of succeeding races - Huns, Goths, Vandals, Franks and before the successive waves the Celts were driven against the western coast.  This process was seen in Scotland when the British inhabitants were driven westward by the oncoming waves of Saxons, Angles, and Danes in the fifth and following centuries.

"Thus driven against the western shores of Brition these Celts were known, down to the Norman Conquest, as the Britons or Welsh of Strathclyde, of Wales and of West Wales or Cornwall.

"In the north, beyond the Forth and among the mountain fastnesses, as well as in the south of Galloway, the Celtic race continued to hold its own.  By the Roman chroniclers the tribes there were known as the Caledonians or Picts.  Between the Forth and the Grampians were the Southern Picts, north of the Grampians were the Northern Picts, and in Galloway were the Niduarian Picts.  To which branch of the Celtic race, British or Gaelic, or a separate branch by themselves, the Picts belonged, is not now known. From the fact that after the Roman legions were withdrawn they made fierce war upon the British tribes south of the Forth, it seems likely that they were not British.  Dr W.F. Skene, in his Highlanders of Scotland, took elaborate pains to prove that the Picts were Gaelic, an earlier wave of the same race as the Gaels or Scots who then peopled Ireland, at that time known as Scotia.

"Exactly how these Scots came into the sister isle is not now known. According to their own tradition they derived their name from Scota, daughter of one of the Pharoahs (of Egypt), whom one of their leaders married as they passed westward through Egypt, and it is possible they may be identified with the division of the Celtic tribes which passed along the north coast of Africa.  According to Gaelic tradition the Scots migrated from Spain to the south of Ireland.  According to the same tradition they brought with them the flat brown stone, about nine inches thick, known as Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, on which their kings were crowned, and which was said to have been Jacob's pillow at Bethel on the plain of Luz.

"From Ireland they began to cross into Kintyre - "Headland" - in the sixth century.  Their three leaders were Fergus, Lorn, and Angus, sons of Erc, and their progress was not always a matter of peaceful settlement.  Fergus, for instance, made a landing in Ayrshire, and defeated and slew Coyle the British king of the district, whose tumulus is still to be seen at Coylesfield, and whose name is still commemorated as that of the region, Kyle, and in popular rhymes about 'Old King Cole.'

"In Kintyre and the adjoining neighbourhood the invaders established the little Dalriadic kingdom, so called from their place of origin in the north-east of Ireland, Dal-Riada, the "Portion of Riada," conquered in the third century by Fergus's ancestor, Cairbre-Riada, brother of Cormac, an Irish King.  They had their first capital at Dun-add near the present Crinan Canal, and from their possession the district about Loch Awe took the name of Oire-Gaidheal, or Argyall, the "Land of the Gael."

"These settlers were Christian, and the name of their patron saint, Kiaran, remains in Kilkiaran, the old name of Campbelltown, Kil-kiaran in Islay, Kilkiaran in Lismore, and Kilkerran in Carrick, which is still in possession of the Fergusons at the present hour.  The invasion, however, received one of its strongest impulses from a later missionary.  Columba crossed from Ireland and settled in Iona in the year 565, and very soon, with his followers, began a great campaign of Christian conversion among the Northern Picts.  The Picts and early Britons, as is shown by their monuments and the folk-customs they have handed down to us, were worshippers of Baal and Ashtaroth.  Columba's conversion of Bruud, king of the Northern Picts at his stronghold at Inverness, opened up the whole country to the Gaelic influence.

"By and by marriages took place between the Pictish and the Gaelic royal houses, and these led, in the ninth century, to disputes over the succession to the Pictish crown.  In the struggle which followed, Alpin, king of the Scots, was beheaded by the Picts on Dundee Law, in sight of his own host.  But the whole matter was finally decided by the victory of Alpin's son, Kenneth II, over the last Pictish army, in the year 838, at the spot called Cambuskenneth after the event, on the bank of the Forth near Stirling.  Six years later Kenneth succeeded to the Pictish throne.

"The history of these early centuries is to be gathered from Adamnan's Life of Columba, the Annals of Tighernac, the Annals of Ulster, the Albanach Duan, Bede's Chronicle, and other works.

"By that time another warlike race made its appearance on the western coasts.  At their first coming, the Dalriads or Scots from Ireland had been known as Gallgael - Gaelic strangers.  The new piratical visitors who now appeared from the eastern shores of the North Sea, received the name of Fion-gall or "fair-haired strangers."  Worshippers of Woden and Thor, they proved at first fierce and bitter enemies to the Christian Picts and Gaels, slaying the monks of Iona on their own alter, and even penetrating so far as to burn Dunbarton, the capital of the Britons of Srathclyde, in the year 780.  In the face of this menace, Kenneth, in the year of his victory over the Picts, (838) removed the Lia Fail from his own stronghold of Dunstaffnage on Loch Etive, to Scone on the Tay, transferred the bones of Columba from Iona to Dunkeld, and fixed his own royal seat at the ancient capital of the Southern Picts, Forteviot on the Earn.  This remained the capital of the Scoto-Pictish kings for two centuries, till in 1057 Malcolm Canmore, son of the "gracious" Duncan and the miller's daughter of Forteviot, overthrew Macbeth, and set up the Capital of his new dynasty at Dunfermline.

"Meanwhile the Norsemen overran not only the Western Isles but much of the northern part of the country.  For a time it was an even chance whether ancient Caledonia should become Norseland or Scotland.  Under Malcolm Canmore and his sons, however the Scots pushed their conquests south of the Forth, annexed Strathclyde, Northumberland, and Westmoreland, and became a formidable power in the land.  David I fortified his dynasty against attack by planting the country with Norman and English barons and introducing the feudal system; and the final issue with the Norsemen was fought out by the last of his race, the last of the Celtic line of kings, Alexander III, at the battle of Largs in 1263."

After the death of Columba more than four centuries had to elapse before Scotland was united under the rule of a single King.  To rule the whole of Scotland he must break three rival kings in battle or march into their kingdom when they were attached by other enemies or take advantage of a disputed succession to snatch the coveted crown, or establish a claim through marriage and descent.

For a time it seemed as if the whole of Scotland might be merged in the English Kingdom of Northumbria.  That kingdom already included Lothian, and in the middle of the seventh century the Northumbrian King forced the rulers of Pictland and Strathclyde to acknowledge him as their overlord. When a more vigorous Pictish King challenged the Northumbrian power, King Ecgfrith of Northumbria invaded Pictland and was slain in battle.

The Picts freed from the Northumbrian menace, resumed vigorous warfare against the kings of Dalriada.  Alpin's son, Kenneth, possessed himself of the stronghold of the Pictish kings at Forteviot and became king of both Picts and Scots in 844.  Kenneth's accession marks the end of the first stage in the unification of Scotland and the beginning of the Kingdom of Alba as it was now called.

In 1016, Eadulf Cudel Earl of Northumbia bought off Malcolm, King of Scots,
by surrendering to him the whole of Lothian.  And by 1018 the bond that united Cumbria or Strathclyde to Malcolm's other possessions was tightened. Up to this time Cumbria had its own line of kings, although they had long been kinsmen of the kings of Alba.  When in 1018 Owen the Bald, the last of his line, died he was succeeded by Duncan, the grandson of King Malcolm and the heir to the Scottish Crown.

So in the year 1018 the boundaries of Scotland became pretty much what they
are at the present day.  There two important differences: the southern boundary line dipped much farther down than it does now, for Stathclyde included not only the basin of the Clyde, but Cumberland, Westmoreland, and part of Lancashire, and the western boundary line kept close to the mainland, for though the Norsemen in the Hebrides seldom obeyed the King of Norway, they never obeyed the King of Scots.

In the thirteenth century a curious change came over Scotland: the Norman
baron, the bishop who knew more Latin and French than English, the
English-speaking traders and farmers of Fife and Lothian, the Gaelic- speaking herdsman from the hills, all began to look on themselves as Scotsmen, as people bound together by some mysterious tie, like but not quite the same as, the tie of kinship.  In other words, they were no longer a collection of different races; they had become a nation.  Something very like national pride in the independence of the Scottish kingdom was being expressed.     End

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