It looked unlikely that Duncan’s descent could ever be proved. And it has been speculated that wolves featured on the arms of the old earls of Atholl.īut the kindred of the Columba also married into the kindred of the Isles, so the wolf, the dove and serpent could have come through this route. However on an early seal St Columba is enthroned on a couple of wolves and the supporters of the chief’s arms are a serpent and dove which again suggests descent from the Kindred of St Columba. The chief’s coat of arms incorporates three wolf’s heads.
Skene had found a charter mentioning Andrew de Atholia as father of Duncan who was not mentioned in the traditional pedigrees and from this and the absence of reference to the Island kindred in Duncan’s coat of arms, he decided that the accepted lineage was wrong.īut Duncan the 14th chief, wrote on this subject a good sixty years before Skene and he pointed out that the old oral ‘genealogies may be and actually are very much abridged.’ He did not know of Andrew de Atholia but would have found nothing unusual about his omission from the traditional pedigree.
Then, in the 1830s, the Historiographer Royal for Scotland, William Skene, came to the conclusion that Duncan was descended in the male line from Conan, male descendant of the last Celtic Earl of Atholl, and not from Somerled, and so inherited his estates directly rather than through marriage. This is stated in the oldest sources of both Clan Donald and Clan Donnachaidh. Up until the 19th century the Clan and everyone else knew that he was descended in the male line from the Lords of the Isles, progenitors of Clan Donald. And he passed his Highland Perthshire lands to his descendants.ĭuncan de Atholia is considered the first chief of Clan Donnachaidh and confusion has attached itself to his ancestry. The 3rd earl’s eldest son predeeased his father and his granddaughters carried the earldom out of the old royal line but his second son was Conan whose name appears on charters soon after 1200 receiving grants of land in Glen Errochty. The latter’s second son Malcolm fathered the 2nd Earl of Atholl. Their son was king Duncan, famously murdered by Macbeth who was in turn killed by Malcolm Canmore. His daughter married Crinan, lay abbot of Dunkeld and male heir to the Celtic earls of Atholl. Malcolm II who died in 1034 was the last of the direct male line from Kenneth. A century later, in 848 the Scot Kenneth MacAlpine was able to claim the crown of both peoples, forming the nucleus of modern Scotland and he set up his capital at Dunkeld to which he moved the 200 year-old college of Dull. It must have been one of the first Pictish kingdoms to be infiltrated by the Scots for the name itself derives from Flota, meaning New Ireland, first appearing in the Annals of Ulster in 739. In 730 AD Angus McFergus, King of the Picts, ousted the Moraemar or petty king of Atholl and and took it over as a royal possession. Now the chief is back, and the clan once more owns land in Atholl. By then the chiefship had passed to a branch of the family who, about 1800, had emigrated to make a living in Jamaica. In 1926 the last land in Rannoch was sold. He moved to a new house at Dall but sold that in 1861. Our chiefs did not evict clansmen and no clearances took place on their estate, but in 1853 our chief sold Struan and Dunalastair, leaving only Rannoch. Fter the Battle of Culloden, estates owned by Jacobites were forfeited and run by the government until 1784 when they were returned - along with the old debts.īut the clan system had been destroyed and chiefs found it increasingly difficult to make a living.