How long had Macquaries been on Ulva?
In 1773, James Boswell, accompanying his curmudgeonly hero Sam Johnson, wrongly accredited as the compiler of the first English dictionary, although his was significantly better than anything preceding it and pretty much formed the basis for most of those following, spent a night in the house of the Macquarie clan chieftain, "Mr M'Quarrie". This was the same Lauchlan Macquarrie to whom our Lachlan Macquarie paid obeisance throughout his chieftain's long life (he died in 1818 at the grand age of, allegedly and apparently correctly, 103).
Boswell wrote: M'Quarrie's house was mean; but we were agreeably surprised with the appearance of the master, whom we found to be intelligent, polite, and much a man of the world. Though his clan is not numerous, he is a very ancient chief, and has a burial place at Icolmkill [Iona]. He told us, his family had possessed Ulva for nine hundred years; but I was distressed to hear that it was soon to be sold for the payment of his debts. Sammy Johnson, Jimbo Boswell's mate (that's as in " friend", not "sex buddy"), had a brief note about Ulva and its people in the book he wrote while on the same trip as Boswell - see here.
Johnson wrote a letter to the bloke who, probably knowingly, bought old Lauchlan's lands that weren't really his, but his clan's, from the same surnamed rip-off shyster lawyer who conned old Lauchlan Macquarrie out of his inheritance, taking advantage of the poor old bugger going broke trying to support his clan. Coincidentally, the con artist and his buyer were Campbells, and Johnson was well aware of the antipathy throughout much of the Highlands and Islands towards Campbells for the massacre at Glencoe, their betrayal of Charles Stuart and support for the Hanoverians, and various other peccadilloes. Most of this was, of course, unfair. Not all Campbells, a very large clan, were involved in any of this stuff, and one of the mounds of slaughtered supporters of the great stuff-up expert Charles Stuart is made up of Campbells. Johnson's letter included the following: "Every eye must look with pain on a Campbell turning the MacQuarries at will out of their sedes avitae [ancestral seat], their hereditary island." Time would tell, however, that there were much worse, infinitely worse, bastards out there than a Campbell, at least, as far as the Macquaries were concerned. The Vikings started raiding Iona (see Map U07 below - the location of a monastery and convent on the leading christian site in Scotland, founded by the Irish christian Columba) in the 790s, and again in the 800s. These were the typical massacre, rape, and pillage raids we ordinarily associate with Vikings. Not long afterwards, however, the Vikings became settlers, but their dominance in the islands, the northern highlands, and Orkney was clear. In a while, with Vikings taking local girls, their descendants were Viking-Gaels, who continued to dominate the region until around the 13th century. Gradually, however, they became more Gael than Viking, eventually becoming indistinguishable from those locals without Viking ancestors. So, if "M'Quarrie's" story is accurate, 900 years prior to his time would be the mid to later 800s. And if the story of the name "Ulva" being derived from the nickname of the first Viking to hold the place (allegedly "Wolf" - "úlfr" in Old Norse) is true (which it may well not be, there are a couple of other quite good theories), Wolf would probably have settled there in the mid 800s, at around the same time as the Vikings took over the rest of the Inner Hebrides. If both stories are true, Wolf or a descendant either gifted the island to the Macquaries not long after Wolf took it from whoever held it before him, or the Macquaries took it off Wolf or his descendants and the relevant lord or king let them keep it. As the whole area fell under Viking kingship and the Macquaries were culturally and linguistically Gaelic neither seems all that likely. On the other hand, as the rulers gradually became more Gaelic themselves, a later occupation by the Macquaries seems possible. The earliest discovered written mention of the Macquaries on Ulva dates from 1450, but of course that doesn't mean they didn't occupy the joint much earlier. All early records were burnt in a fire in 1688, so any more speculation is, as is the case with most speculation, nothing but ill-informed guesswork. |