Clan Maclaine of Lochbuie & Clan Ross

The Macleans are Clann 'IllEathain in Gaelic, an anglicisation of MacGilleEathain, the patronymic of a name meaning servant of Saint John: so son of the servant of John.21 The clan takes that name from Gillean of the Battle Axe, Gilleain na Tuaighe, placed by the clan at roughly 1210 to 1263, and tradition puts him and his sons at the Battle of Largs in 1263 where Alexander III turned back the Norwegian fleet.121 Largs is tradition, not record, and is best read that way.

Gillean's great-grandson Iain Dubh, Black John, had two sons: Eachann Reaganach, Hector the Stern, and Lachlan Lubanach, Lachlan the Wily. Each took a separate charter of lands on Mull from the Lord of the Isles, Hector at Lochbuie and Lachlan at Duart.14 The date is not agreed: the encyclopaedic account says about 1350, the chief's own society says 1360.123 That division is the origin of the two clans, and of the long argument about which is the elder.

Clan Ross begins further north and rather earlier, in a church office rather than a warband. Applecross was a monastery founded in 672 by Máel Ruba, who died there in 722; the deaths of several of his successors as abbot are recorded in the Irish annals into the early ninth century.24 Fearchar mac an t-Sagairt, son of the priest, is held to have come of the lay abbots of that house.37 He put down a rebellion against Alexander II, was knighted in 1215, appears in a charter of 1224 to 1231 styled Comes de Ross, and held the earldom by 1232.3

Beyond the traditions, this is where the paper starts. A Maclean and an Anderson are both first recorded in 1296, in the homages taken across Scotland for Edward I: Gilmore Maclyn, and David le fiz Andreu, burgess of Peebles.2021 A McFadyen appears in 1304, when Malcolm Macpadene witnessed a charter at Achichendone in Kintyre.20 Everything earlier than that, for any of these names, is tradition, inference or a genealogy written down centuries after the fact.

Moy Castle is a tower house at the head of Loch Buie, and it stayed the chiefs' residence for four hundred years until Lochbuie House replaced it in 1752.1 Tradition attributes it to Hector Reaganach, but most of the surviving tower belongs to the first half of the fifteenth century and no contemporary record names a builder, so the attribution is inherited rather than documented.23 The lands were erected into the barony of Moy in 1542 under the sixth chief, which is why the chief is styled Baron of Moy to this day.15

Both houses sat on the Council of the Lord of the Isles, and which of Lochbuie or Duart is the senior line has been disputed for centuries and is not settled here.5 The spelling that now divides them can be dated: it was Hector, eighth of Lochbuie, who began writing the name Maclaine, and later chiefs kept it.1 Before that the Lochbuie chiefs appear as Macleans, as when John M'Gilleoin is recorded in 1485 as dominus de Lochbuye.20

The clan also carries a tradition of descent from Maurice Fitzgerald, the Anglo-Norman who came to Ireland with Strongbow, with offshoots said to have reached Scotland in the thirteenth century.1 Origin legends of this kind attach to many Highland clans and are generally later constructions; the encyclopaedic account of the clan notes the stories without substantiating them.21 It is recorded here as tradition, not as descent that can be traced.

The line did not end but the land did. The twenty-fourth chief, Kenneth Douglas Lorne Maclaine, lost the Lochbuie estates in a contested lawsuit that ended in foreclosure in March 1922, and the property was sold that year to Sir Richard Garton, whose descendants still farm it.1 The chiefship carried on regardless, which is the point worth holding on to: a chiefship is an office in Scots law, not a landholding.

The name is Gaelic Mac Phàidein, son of Pàidean, a diminutive of Pàdraig: son of little Patrick.2026 So unlike Ross, which is a place, and unlike Maclean, which is a church office, this family name records an individual person whose name nobody now knows beyond the fact that he was called Patrick and was small, or young, or a son. The earliest bearer on record is Malcolm Macpadene, who witnessed a charter at Achichendone in Kintyre in 1304.20

The McFadyens held the ground at the head of Loch Buie before the Macleans arrived. The encyclopaedic account of Moy Castle says plainly that it was built on land formerly held by them, and Black's dictionary of Scottish surnames records that they were said to have been the first possessors of Lochbuie.1206 The sept did not join the clan so much as the clan arrived on top of the sept, which is the more usual Highland pattern and the less flattering one.

Tradition tells it sharply, and the chief's own society tells it too. The McFadyen chief had a barmkin at the head of the loch, a walled enclosure with wooden houses inside it. Hector climbed to the top of the wall and put an arrow through the bone the McFadyen chief was eating on the ground below; whether he was aiming at the bone or the man is not recorded, and the McFadyen chief, being no fool, removed himself.236 It is a good story and it should be read as one: it explains a transfer of land in the idiom of a duel.

What happened next is the part the legend leaves out. Black records that on being expelled they became a race of wandering artificers, known in Mull as the race of goldsmiths.20 Whatever the confrontational beginning, the two families became allies, and the McFadyens are counted a sept of Maclaine of Lochbuie by the chief's own society.56 A competing account circulated by commercial surname sites attaches the McFadyens instead to Clan MacEachern of Islay, a branch of Clan Donald; it is offered without evidence and is noted here only so that it is not mistaken for a second, independent confirmation.

The name is a place. Ross is the northern province, from Gaelic ros, and the clan's own Gaelic names are Clann Anndrais and Na Rosaich, the Ross people.2 Fearchar's byname, son of the priest, records an inheritance rather than a father: the lay abbacy of Applecross, held in a family since Máel Ruba's foundation of 672.324 The earldom he was granted in the 1220s and 1230s turned that church office into a provincial lordship.3

The Applecross descent is a scholarly proposal, not a documented line, and it is currently under challenge. It was advanced by William Reeves and W. F. Skene, who took Fearchar for a descendant of the Ó Beólláin kindred of hereditary abbots.37 Alexander Grant has argued that the evidence for it is far too thin to displace the plainer and better attested idea that Fearchar simply came from Easter Ross, and that mac an t-Sagairt more likely marks a family that kept the shrine of St Duthac at Tain.3 The page carries the Applecross story because it is the received one, and flags it as contested because it is.

Fearchar died traditionally in 1251, and his son Uilleam, who appears as early as 1232 witnessing a charter as the son of Ferquhard, Earl of Ross, was mormaer by the 1250s.32 The earldom ran in the family for six generations and then left it: William, sixth earl, died without a male heir and the title passed through a female line, while the chiefship went to his brother Hugh Ross of Rariches, who was granted a charter for the lands of Balnagowan in 1374 and is counted first of Balnagown.2 Every later chief descends from that 1374 charter, not from the earldom.

This is the trap in the name. Black records that the first appearance of the surname in Scotland is not northern at all: a family of Ros or Ross from Yorkshire held a considerable part of northern Ayrshire in the twelfth century, and Godfrey de Ros witnesses a charter in Cunningham about 1189, a generation before Fearchar.20 They are Anglo-Norman incomers with no connection to the earls of Ross. A Ross surname on its own therefore settles nothing about Highland descent, and the earlier record belongs to the other family.

The seat is still Balnagown Castle in Easter Ross. The chiefship passed in 2024, on the death of David Campbell Ross, to Fiona Campbell Ross of Ross and Balnagowan, recognised by the Lord Lyon King of Arms.2

Anderson is not an outside name attached to Clan Ross by a Victorian list. Clan Ross's own Gaelic name is Clann Anndrais, the children of Andrew.2 Anderson means son of Andrew; the Gaelic MacGhilleAndrais, son of the servant of Andrew, gives Gillanders and MacGillanders.25 The clan and the sept are the same word in different languages.

The surname is documented from the end of the thirteenth century, but in the Lowlands and in French. Both of the earliest bearers Black records appear in the homages of 1296: David le fiz Andreu, burgess of Peebles, and Duncan fiz Andreu in the county of Dumfries.20 The Scots forms follow later — Henry Androsoun about 1443, John Andirstoun as a commissioner to parliament in 1585 — and the modern spelling settles only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.20

Gillanders is frequently found among the early Rosses and is often treated as equivalent to Ross itself, in the line descending from Fearchar mac an t-Sagairt.2 The related form MacAndrew connects the name both to Ross and, from the fifteenth century, to the Clan Chattan federation, so a MacAndrew descent does not by itself settle which clan is meant.

Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, so sons of Andrew appear independently in every part of the country, and Anderson is common over a good part of Scotland with its heaviest concentration in the north-east, from the Mearns through Aberdeenshire, Banff and Moray.2025 The name alone therefore establishes nothing: a documented descent does. That is the work the tree below is for.

None of these families chose how their name was written. Until the nineteenth century spelling was the clerk's business, not the bearer's: a Gaelic name was caught in Scots or Latin or French by whoever held the pen, and the same man could be written three ways in three documents. So the lists below are not variants of a correct form. They are the record of what was actually written down, and the dated forms come from Black's dictionary of Scottish surnames.20

MacFadzean is not a different name from McFadyen, and the z was never meant to be read as one. Middle Scots used the letter yogh, and its handwritten form was easily confused with a cursive z; early Scottish printers, whose fonts had no yogh, substituted z outright.22 The same substitution gives Menzies, properly Mingis, Dalziel, properly Dee-yell, and MacKenzie, once MacKenyie.22 So MacFadzean and McFadyen are one name written by two centuries with different type cases, and the family's own modern spelling is McFadyen, which is the one this page uses.

Most published sept lists date from the nineteenth century, when clan societies and tartan manufacturers drew up lists linking as many surnames as possible to a clan, so that anyone without a clan name could feel entitled to a tartan.11 The first publication to pair septs and dependents with their clans was Frank Adam's, in 1896.8 A list is a commercial artefact as much as a genealogical one.

The wider apparatus is no older. Clan tartans as we know them are largely a nineteenth-century creation, and even Walter Scott, who did more than anyone to stage the tartan revival at George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, doubted their authenticity.9 Scholarship continues to weigh how much of this is Romantic invention and how much genuine survival.10

None of this makes the connections false. It means sept membership is an association recognised by a clan society, not a proven line of descent, and the two should not be dressed as one. Every source below is tagged with what kind of source it is, so a charter date and a castle legend do not look alike. The family tree carries the descent that can actually be documented.

Neither badge below is a coat of arms. In Scotland arms are private property, and the Lyon King of Arms Act 1592 gave the Lyon Court full power to fine and imprison; it can still order items bearing another’s arms removed, destroyed or forfeited, and misappropriating arms is a real injury at common law.17 The crest and motto belong to the chief alone. What a clan member may wear is the crest badge: that crest and motto inside a strap and buckle, the strap marking the wearer as a follower rather than the owner.16

Section 07 called clan tartan a nineteenth-century construction, and the register bears that out. The Lochbuie and Ross setts both survive in the Cockburn Collection, gathered between 1810 and 1820; the Lochbuie sett was first published by Grant in 1886, and the McFadyen sett, which the register records as MacFadzean, and the Anderson are twentieth-century records of earlier samples.12 The register reveals threadcounts only to signed-in users, so these four are taken from published transcriptions of the same records and checked against two further collections.1314 Shade letters differ a little between collections; the structures agree.

The map marks three places and no boundaries. Clan territory was a shifting matter of tenancy, kinship and force, contested at the time and contested now, so drawing an outline around either clan would be invention dressed as record. The Auld Sett of Maclaine of Lochbuie is missing from the swatches for a related reason: it is restricted to the chiefly family and needs the Chief’s written permission, so it is named here and not reproduced.15