Glen Dochart — A Sacred Landscape
The MacNab clan was born from an abbacy. Its ground was consecrated by a saint. Its relic keepers had the power of kings. Its seers looked into tomorrow. And its prophetess still haunts the shore of Loch Tay.
The MacNab clan did not simply inhabit a piece of Perthshire geography. They inhabited a landscape that was already ancient, already charged, already sacred long before the first abbots built their monastery in the glen. The ground of Glendochart and Loch Tay was a place where the membrane between the visible world and what lay beyond it was held, by those who lived here for centuries, to be unusually thin.
Three great traditions converge in MacNab country: the Celtic Christian faith that gave the clan its name and its hereditary role, the Gaelic tradition of the second sight that ran through the Highlands like a current underground, and the great prophetic voice of the Lady of Lawers, whose words spoken on Loch Tay proved true across centuries. Woven through all of it: the older, darker Highland world of water horses, fairy folk, the evil eye, and the host of the dead that flew on the winter wind.
The Foundation
Why the MacNab Church Was Different — And Why It Became a Dynasty
The MacNab clan takes its name from the abbacy of Glendochart. That is not a small thing. To understand it fully, you have to understand how different the Celtic Christian church of early Scotland was from what came later under Rome.
Celtic Christianity, as practiced in the monastery tradition of Columba on Iona and Fillan in Glendochart, was organized around abbots, not bishops. The abbot was the supreme authority: spiritual, legal, and practical. He ran the monastery, managed the lands, administered justice, and led the community. He was, in every meaningful sense, the lord of the glen.
Unlike Rome, the Celtic church had no rule of clerical celibacy. Abbots could marry. Their sons could inherit the abbacy. This produced exactly what you would expect: hereditary abbacies, where the office and the land passed from father to son across generations, just as a chieftaincy would. The Abbot of Glendochart became a dynasty. His descendants became the clan that bears his title: Mac an Aba. Son of the Abbot.
The monastery at Glendochart was not a passive institution. The abbots were described in the reign of William the Lion (1165-1214) as men of such consequence that they were joined with the Earl of Atholl in having the rule and management of Argyllshire, when the royal authority could not be trusted to anyone belonging to that turbulent district. These were not quiet men of prayer. They were administrators, military figures, political actors, and the inheritors of a tradition that stretched back to St Fillan himself.
The monastery at Glendochart was a center of the clan’s educational, medical, and spiritual life. The monks maintained records, provided hospitality to travellers, administered basic medicine, and kept alive the tradition of Gaelic learning. When Rome eventually imposed its own rules on the Scottish church in the 12th and 13th centuries, the hereditary abbacy did not simply disappear. It transformed into the hereditary clan chieftaincy, carrying the same authority under a different name.
Iona Abbey — the mother house of Celtic Christianity in Scotland. The tradition that Fillan carried to Glendochart began here.
Mac an Aba
Mak-an-AH-ba
Son of the Abbot. The hereditary abbots of Glendochart became a clan. The clan became the MacNabs. The name carries the abbacy in every generation, to this day.
Celtic vs Roman Christianity
Before Christianity
Iron Age — Crannogs — The Sacred Landscape Before the Abbots
The MacNab claim to their ground is old. But the ground itself is older still. Long before the first abbot of Glendochart walked the valley, long before St Fillan built his priory in Strathfillan, this landscape was already a place of human spiritual significance that stretches back to the Iron Age and beyond.
Loch Tay contains more than twenty submerged crannogs, the man-made islands that the Iron Age peoples of Scotland constructed in lochs for habitation and ritual purpose. These required enormous collective effort to build and represent a profound relationship between the community and the water. The Scottish Crannog Centre on the loch’s south shore at Kenmore allows visitors to walk inside a full-scale reconstruction.
At Killin, on the burial island of Innis Bhuidhe where nine MacNab chiefs lie buried, archaeological investigation has identified the foundations of two Iron Age forts, both scheduled as ancient monuments. The island was a place of power long before any MacNab set foot on it. The pre-Christian peoples who built there chose it deliberately. When the MacNab abbots later selected it as their burial ground, they were placing themselves on ground that the land itself had already consecrated in ways no document records.
It is likely that the sacred character of the site, recognized for centuries before Christianity arrived, made it the natural choice for the clan’s most sacred ground. Spiritual significance, in the Highland world, accumulated. It did not begin and end with any single tradition.
Loch Iubhair, Glen Dochart — ancient ground, inhabited for thousands of years
Sacred Sites in MacNab Country
The 7th Century
The Man Who Consecrated the MacNab Homeland
St Fillan was an Irish missionary of royal blood who came to Glendochart in the early 8th century. His name in Irish Gaelic means little wolf. His mother was St Kentigerna, daughter of an Irish prince of Munster, herself later venerated as a saint. His father was of ancient Dál Riatan lineage, the same royal house from which the MacNab line ultimately descends. He built his church and priory in Strathfillan, the valley running southwest from Crianlarich into Glen Dochart, and he named the entire landscape with his presence. The area is still called Strathfillan to this day.
What he left behind was something more lasting than stone. His miracles became part of the living memory of the glen for centuries. His hand was said to glow with supernatural light, allowing him to write scripture after dark without a candle. When a wolf killed his ox while he ploughed, Fillan commanded the wolf to take the dead animal’s place in the yoke and it obeyed, ploughing the field in the ox’s place. He drove a wild boar away from the farming community near Killin that had been terrorizing the area.
He left behind eight healing stones, each smooth, each shaped like the organ it was associated with healing: a liver-shaped stone for liver complaints, and so on through the body. The stones were stored in the River Dochart and turned on Christmas Eve each year by local tradition. They were brought indoors in 1798 by the local minister, who feared they would be washed away. They are now kept in the Breadalbane Folklore Centre in Killin, housed in the former mill on the banks of the Falls of Dochart, a mill whose original predecessor was said to have been established by Fillan himself. By longstanding tradition, the mill was never operated on 9 January, St Fillan’s feast day, even after the medieval period.
Fillan is the patron saint of the mentally ill in Scotland. This is because of what happened at his healing pool, one of the most extraordinary medical and spiritual traditions in Scottish history.
Fillan
Fih-LAN — Little Wolf
An Irish royal missionary of the Celtic Christian tradition, 7th to early 8th century. Patron saint of the mentally ill. His relics, kept by the MacNab Dewars, were carried to the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
St Fillan’s Miracles — The Record
St Fillan’s Pool — Strathfillan
A Practice Recorded in 1792 — Continued Until the 19th Century
Near the ruins of St Fillan’s Priory in Strathfillan, where the River Fillan makes a sharp bend, there is a deep natural pool. It is divided by a rock formation into two sides, historically described as the male and female sides. For over a thousand years, from the 7th century until the early 19th century, this pool was used in a ritual for the healing of mental illness. It was one of the most enduring sacred healing traditions in Scotland.
The ritual was recorded in detail by the traveller Robert Heron, who passed through in 1792. The patient was immersed three times in the pool. They then had to dive to the bottom and surface with stones. After this, they walked three times around each of three stone cairns on the bank, placing a stone on each one with each circuit. They were then stripped naked, bound hand and foot, carried to the nearby chapel at the priory, and laid on the ground beside St Fillan’s tomb. The Bernane, the saint’s bell kept by the MacNab Dewars, was placed on their chest or suspended above their head for the night.
If they were found to have broken free of their bonds by morning, this was taken as a sign that they were heading toward a cure. If they had not broken free, the process was begun again.
Six links of the iron chain used to bind patients at the healing pool survive to this day. They are held at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, catalogued as one of the most unusual objects in their collection. The pool itself still exists, now quiet, the stone cairns long gone, but the bend in the river and the deep water there unchanged. St Fillan remains the patron saint of those with mental illness in Scotland. The tradition persisted for roughly 1,100 years.
Two distinct healing sites served two distinct purposes. The Killin site, where the healing stones are kept, was used for bodily ailments. The pool in Strathfillan was specifically associated with psychological and mental illness. The distinction was recognized and maintained across the centuries.
“The patient is thrice immersed in the pool. He is bound hand and foot, and left for the night in the chapel. If found loose in the morning, recovery is expected.”
Robert Heron, 1792 — recording the tradition at St Fillan’s Pool, still in active useA MacNab Sept
Hereditary Keepers of the Relics of Saint Fillan — Since c.777 AD
Deòraidh
DEH-oh-ree — The Dewars
Originally meaning “pilgrim” or “wanderer.” Over time it became the specific title for the hereditary custodian of a saint’s relics. In Glendochart, the Dewars were not merely inhabitants. They were officials of the sacred, recognized in law by multiple Scottish monarchs.
The Dewar family was a recognized sept of Clan MacNab. Their role was one of the most extraordinary in medieval Scotland: the hereditary custodians of the relics of St Fillan, a charge passed from father to son since approximately 777 AD. The Dewar of the Quigrich held a right confirmed by multiple Scottish monarchs to march through any part of Scotland, through the territory of any clan, carrying the crozier to track down stolen goods. Any farmer who lost livestock could summon the Dewar. The Dewar would take the Quigrich and walk, and it was believed that St Fillan’s power would curse those who refused to comply.
In 1487, King James III confirmed their rights in a royal letter, stating the Dewars had held the Quigrich “sen the tyme of King Robert the Bruys and of before.” The Privy Council reconfirmed this in 1549. In 1818, Archibald Dewar emigrated to Beckwith Township, Ontario, taking the Quigrich with him. Alexander Dewar, the last keeper, surrendered it to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1877. He wept. It is now in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, catalogue H.KC 1 and H.KC 2.
The Quigrich
Coigreach — The Crozier
A silver and gold reliquary casing from the late 13th century, encasing the original 8th-century bronze crozier head. Used for healing, oaths, dispute settlement, and recovery of stolen cattle. Taken to Canada 1818. Returned 1877. Now in the National Museum of Scotland.
The Bernane
Saint Fillan’s Bell
A bronze bell used in healing ceremonies at the Holy Pool. Placed on the chest of patients bound overnight in the chapel. Also in the National Museum of Scotland.
The Fergy
The Miracle-Working Stone
A sacred stone with healing powers. The Dewar who kept it derived his surname from the role: Dewar na Ferg, keeper of the stone. Its current location is unknown.
The Mayne
The Arm Bone Reliquary
A silver reliquary containing the arm bone of St Fillan himself. The most sacred relic. Present at the Battle of Bannockburn 1314. The subject of the most celebrated miracle in MacNab spiritual history. Now lost.
The Battle of Bannockburn — 1314
When the Reliquary Opened Itself
On the eve of Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce knelt in prayer with the MacNab Dewar and the Abbot of Inchaffray beside the relics of St Fillan. The Dewar had secretly brought only the empty reliquary — the silver case of the arm bone — leaving the actual bone behind for safety. He feared losing it to the English if Bruce lost. While the three men knelt in prayer, a noise came from the case. The door opened. Inside, where there should have been nothing, the arm bone of St Fillan lay. It had not been there when they arrived at the battlefield. Bruce took this as a sign of divine favour, went into battle the following morning, and won the most decisive victory in Scottish history. He subsequently founded a priory at Strathfillan to honour the saint whose intercession he credited.
“The reliquary opened. The bone that had been left behind was found within it. Robert the Bruce went into battle convinced of divine favour. He won.”
The Eve of Bannockburn, June 1314The Highland Tradition
The Seers of the Second Sight in MacNab Country
Throughout the history of Clan MacNab, Macnab, McNab, and McNabb, there ran a thread that no amount of formal Christianity ever fully displaced: the ancient Highland tradition of the taibhsear, those who possessed An Dà Shealladh, the Two Sights. The clan’s records acknowledge these seers as part of its spiritual heritage, and the landscape of Glendochart and Loch Tay was precisely the kind of ground where the tradition flourished.
The taibhsear was not a voluntary condition. Second sight was not a skill that could be learned. It came unbidden, usually at dusk or in moments of stillness, and it showed the seer a reality running parallel to the visible world. It was widely recorded across the Highlands as a burden, not a power. The visions came whether the seer wanted them or not, and they usually foretold unhappy things: a death, a drowning, a defeat.
In Glen Dochart and the Loch Tay country, the tradition was deeply embedded. This was a landscape already saturated in the supernatural: St Fillan’s healing pool, the Dewar’s crozier, the Iron Age forts under Innis Bhuidhe, the crannogs under Loch Tay. A place where the veil was held to be thin would naturally produce those who could see through it. Those who lived closest to the sacred, including the MacNab Dewars who kept St Fillan’s relics for over a thousand years, were those most likely to carry the gift.
Loch Tay — the landscape where the seers and the Lady of Lawers prophesied
An Dà Shealladh
The Two Sights — The Highland Tradition of Prophetic Vision
An Dà Shealladh
An-Dah-HYALL-ugh — The Two Sights
“The vision of the world of sense is one sight, ordinarily possessed by all, but the world of spirits is visible only to certain persons.” — Rev. John Gregorson Campbell, collecting Highland testimonies in the 1850s and 1860s
The Gaelic name is not “second sight” as a metaphor. It is literally two sights: the ordinary vision of stone and water and flesh, and a second vision of what runs beneath and behind it. What the taibhsear saw was called a taibhs: an apparition or double, appearing with perfect clarity as a real physical presence. The taibhs was not a ghost. It was a kind of pre-echo: the living double of a person about to experience something significant, usually something fatal.
The faculty was involuntary. It could not be summoned or refused. It came at dusk, at liminal moments, near water. Those who possessed it were recognized as people set apart, carrying knowledge that was painful to bear. A wright in Kinloch Rannoch was reported to hear the sounds of planes and hammers at work before any death in the village, foreknowing that he would soon be making a coffin. He heard these sounds so often he was afflicted by them through most of his life.
In MacNab country, on the shores of Loch Tay and in the passes of Glen Dochart, the tradition was part of the fabric of daily life. The most celebrated seer on these shores was not a MacNab by blood. But she lived on the north shore of Loch Tay, spoke about MacNab lands, and proved right in ways that are difficult to explain by any ordinary accounting.
Highland Folklore
What the People of MacNab Country Believed Lived in the Water
Loch Tay is 150 metres deep in places. Its water is dark and cold, fed by snowmelt from Ben Lawers above. The Iron Age peoples who built crannogs on it were not the last to believe that something inhabited its depths. In the Highland world, deep still lochs were the home of creatures that did not belong to the visible order of things. This was not superstition in the modern dismissive sense. It was a genuine, widely-held, and culturally consistent understanding of the natural world that the MacNab clan shared with every other Highland people for centuries.
The Each-Uisge
Ech-OOSH-kya — The Water Horse
The most feared creature of the Highland lochs, described by the folklorist Katharine Briggs as “perhaps the fiercest and most dangerous of all the water-horses.” Unlike the kelpie of rivers, the each-uisge lived in sea lochs and deep freshwater lochs exactly like Loch Tay. It appeared on the shore as a magnificent, healthy horse with an unusually fine coat, inviting riders. Once mounted, the rider’s hands became stuck to the animal’s skin by an adhesive supernatural force. The horse would then plunge into the loch and drown its rider. It could also appear as a handsome young man, identifiable only by the sand and water weed in his hair. A Perthshire tale recorded near Aberfeldy, at the eastern end of Loch Tay, describes a group of young girls who encountered a pretty pony by the water, climbed on its back one by one as its back lengthened to accommodate them, and were dragged to their deaths. The tale was collected and documented by Katharine Briggs. The each-uisge was used to explain drownings in the loch and to keep children from the water’s edge after dark.
The Kelpie
An Each-Uisge na h-Aibhne — The River Horse
Related to the each-uisge but specifically a creature of rivers and running water rather than still lochs. The River Dochart, which runs through the Falls of Dochart at Killin and the full length of Glen Dochart, was exactly the kind of watercourse associated with kelpie tradition. The kelpie was said to appear as a dark grey or white pony standing near a ford or river crossing. It would tempt a traveller to ride, then bolt into the river and drown them. It was commonly said to retain its hooves in human form, which associated it in the Christian era with images of the devil. Robert Burns referenced kelpie lore in his 1786 poem Address to the Deil. The Falls of Dochart, where the river crashes over rocks into Killin, were exactly the kind of dramatic water feature the Highland tradition placed these creatures in.
The Tarbh Uisge
TAR-av OOSH-kya — The Water Bull
A supernatural bull said to emerge from lochs to mate with ordinary cattle. Unlike the each-uisge, the tarbh uisge was not usually malevolent toward humans. It appeared, conducted its affairs, and returned to the water. Its offspring were said to be identifiable by the shape of their ears, which were described as misshapen or folded. The tradition of the water bull was recorded in many Highland districts including Perthshire. Cattle were the most valuable possession of any Highland clan, and the tarbh uisge was the folk explanation for calves that appeared unexpectedly strong, or that no one could account for by the usual means.
The Peallaidh
A Perthshire Water Monster
Listed in the documented record of Scottish and Gaelic folklore specifically as a Perthshire water creature. The Peallaidh is a less well-documented entity than the each-uisge or kelpie, but is recorded in Highland folklore catalogues as a specific Perthshire beast, belonging to the same general tradition of dangerous water creatures that was documented across the county. The deep, cold Highland lochs of Perthshire, including Loch Tay at 150 metres depth, were natural candidates for these traditions. The unexplained nature of deep water in a pre-scientific culture required some framework to account for it, and the Peallaidh was part of that framework in the MacNab heartland.
The Highland World
The Folk Beliefs That Governed Life in MacNab Country
The MacNab clan lived within an entire Highland world of folk belief that ran alongside and beneath the official Christian faith. These were not fringe ideas held by the ignorant. They were the shared understanding of the community, widely practiced, and often intersecting with the church rather than competing with it. Understanding them is understanding the world that shaped the MacNab character for centuries.
An Droch Shùil — The Evil Eye
The most enduring belief in all of Scottish folk tradition. An droch shùil, the evil eye, was the ability to damage a person’s livestock, crops, children, or health through an envious gaze. The capacity was believed to run in families and to be used involuntarily as well as deliberately. Protection came from knotted thread worn around the wrist, iron carried in the pocket, a piece of charred wood, or water into which silver had been dipped. A Gaelic proverb recorded by collectors of the 1860s stated: “Envy splits the rocks.” The practice of drawing interlaced patterns on doorsteps in whitewash, recorded in Scotland as late as 1937, was partly intended to catch and occupy the evil eye before it could enter the house. The interlaced patterns carved on Highland gravestones, including those on Innis Bhuidhe where the MacNab chiefs are buried, may carry the same protective logic.
The Sìthichean — The Fairy Folk
The sìthichean (singular: sìthiche, pronounced SHEE-huh, SHEE-hun for the plural) were not the winged sprites of Victorian children’s books. They were genuinely feared, other-worldly beings of uncertain nature and uncertain intent. They were divided into the Seelie Court, mischievous but not always harmful, and the Unseelie Court, malicious toward humans by nature. They lived in sìthean, hollow mounds, which were often ancient Neolithic structures in the landscape. The Iron Age mounds identified beneath the surface of Innis Bhuidhe at Killin would have been exactly the kinds of places associated with the sìthichean in local belief. They kidnapped humans, leaving changeling substitutes. They paid a tithe of their number to the dark powers at certain times of year. You did not speak of them carelessly, or by their name. You referred to them as “the good neighbours” or “the people of peace” to avoid drawing their attention.
The Sluagh — The Host of the Dead
The Sluagh (SLOO-ugh), the Host of the Unforgiven Dead, was one of the darker elements of Highland spiritual belief. They were the spirits of those who had died outside of grace, flying in ragged flocks across the winter sky, sweeping down from the west to seize the living and carry them into the darkness. The west was significant: the direction of the setting sun, the direction of the sea, was the direction from which the Sluagh came. Windows on the west side of a house were kept shut on certain nights. People did not willingly stand outside alone when the wind moved from the west in a particular way. The connection to the Night of Twelve Sons is worth noting: the MacNab brothers crossed the mountain and the loch on Christmas Eve, one of the nights in the Highland calendar most charged with spiritual significance, when the veil between the living and the dead was held to be at its thinnest.
The Urisk — The Perthshire Spirit
The Urisk was a Perthshire-specific creature, described as half-human and half-goat, inhabiting lonely waterfalls and remote stretches of rivers. Unlike the each-uisge, the Urisk was sometimes helpful: there are recorded tales of Urisks assisting with farm work in exchange for milk left out overnight. Perthshire was said to have a sizeable population of them, and they were documented to hold gatherings among themselves at recognized meeting places in the hills. The Falls of Dochart at Killin, one of the most dramatic waterfalls in Perthshire, was exactly the kind of location associated with Urisk presence. The tradition was sufficiently established in Perthshire that it was recorded by multiple collectors of Highland folklore through the 19th century.
Samhain and the Liminal Nights
The Highland calendar recognized certain nights as spiritually charged: Samhain (Halloween), Bealltainn (May Day), the winter solstice, and Christmas Eve among them. On these nights the boundaries between the living world and whatever lay beyond it were held to be temporarily dissolved. This was not a cause for celebration so much as a cause for caution. The MacNab tradition itself contains a remarkable coincidence: the Night of Twelve Sons, when Smooth John MacNab’s sons carried the boat over the mountain and destroyed the MacNeish clan, took place on Christmas Eve 1612, one of the most spiritually significant nights in the Highland year. Whether this was deliberate choice or coincidence, the tradition that remembers the night treats it as significant that the deed was done in darkness, in winter, at the threshold between one sacred day and another.
Protective Charms and Everyday Magic
Alongside the great traditions of second sight, the Dewars, and the Lady of Lawers, there was an everyday folk magic embedded in MacNab country life. Iron was universally protective: a nail driven into a threshold, a horseshoe over a door, a knife under the bed of a woman in childbirth. Rowan berries and crossed rowan branches were carried to ward off supernatural harm. The first water drawn from a well on New Year’s morning had special properties. A fire should not be lit without the words “God willing” preceding any important plan, not as piety alone but as protection against the presumption that drew bad luck. These practices ran through every stratum of Highland society, in the chief’s hall and the crofter’s cottage alike, for as long as the Gaelic-speaking world of the Highlands endured.
The Prophetess of Loch Tay
Mid-17th Century — North Shore, Loch Tay — She Still Haunts the Place
In the 1640s and 1650s, in a two-storey house on the north shore of Loch Tay at the foot of Ben Lawers, there lived a woman whose real name has been entirely forgotten. She is known only as the Lady of Lawers, the wife of a Campbell of Lawers, possibly a Stewart of Appin by birth. She possessed An Dà Shealladh at a level that went far beyond the ordinary Highland tradition of second sight.
She did not merely see individual deaths and personal tragedies. She saw centuries ahead. She saw the destruction of the old way of life, the coming of machines, the emptying of the glens. And she named these things in Scots Gaelic, in the 1650s, long before any of them happened. Her prophecies were collected as The Red Book of Balloch, kept at Taymouth Castle, the seat of the Earls of Breadalbane.
Her first prophecy concerned the church being built in the village. She watched the ridging stones arrive by boat from Kenmore and declared they would never be placed on the roof. That night a storm swept the stones into Loch Tay. They were never recovered. From that point, her neighbours listened to her more carefully.
When she died, a catastrophic flood struck the village. Her house is now ruined, the village abandoned, and listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. The Lady of Lawers is said by local tradition to still haunt the Old Village of Lawers on the north shore of Loch Tay. The ruins are occasionally offered for sale.
The Loch Tay country — where the Lady of Lawers prophesied in the 17th century
The Lady of Lawers — The Facts
The Record
Spoken in the 17th Century — Verified Across the Following 200 Years
Fulfilled
“The ridging stones for the church will never be placed on its roof.”
The stones arrived by boat from Kenmore. A storm that night swept every one into Loch Tay. They were never recovered. The builders who had laughed stopped laughing.
Fulfilled — 1833
“When the ash tree reaches the height of the church gable, the church will be split asunder.”
She planted an ash tree beside the church. In 1833, when the tree had reached the height of the gable, a violent thunderstorm demolished the west loft. The church fell out of use and was never repaired.
Fulfilled — 1862
“When the tree reaches the ridge of the church, the house of Balloch will be without an heir.”
In 1862, the Marquis of Breadalbane, whose family seat was Balloch (Taymouth) Castle, died without an heir. To the letter.
Fulfilled — 1870s
“Evil will come to him who harms the ash tree.”
Farmer John Campbell cut it down despite the warning. He was gored to death by his own bull. His assistant lost his sanity and was committed to an asylum. The horse that pulled the farm cart dropped dead. All three events were recorded locally.
Fulfilled — Highland Clearances
“The land will first be sifted, then riddled of its people. The jaw of the sheep will drive the plough from the ground.”
The population of the Loch Tay area fell from approximately 3,500 to around 500 during the Clearances. Sheep farming replaced human settlement across the glen.
Fulfilled — Railways, 1863
“Fire-coaches will yet be seen crossing the Drumochter Pass.”
Spoken two centuries before the steam locomotive existed. The Highland Railway, opened 1863, crosses the Drumochter Pass between Perthshire and Inverness. Trains cross it today.
Fulfilled
“There will be a mill on every stream and a plough on every field.”
Flax became a major Loch Tay industry. Flax mills appeared on almost every stream that flowed into the loch. The industrial transformation of a pastoral landscape fulfilled her description exactly.
Fulfilled — 1823 — The MacNab Prophecy
“When the fir tree on Inch Buidhe falls against another and grafts onto it, the MacNabs will be finished in the land of their fathers.”
The tree fell. The Kinnell estate was foreclosed in 1823. Innis Bhuidhe was sold to the Earl of Breadalbane. The last MacNab chief fled to Canada. Finished in the land, as she had said. Not finished entirely. The name endures.
Still to Come
These Have Not Yet Happened
Of all her prophecies, three remain unfulfilled. Given the record of the others, the Loch Tay area has watched these particular words with a degree of attention that has not diminished since the 17th century.
The spiritual inheritance of Clan MacNab is not a historical footnote. It is physically present in the landscape. The Quigrich and the Bernane are in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh in the Kingdom of the Scots gallery. The eight healing stones of St Fillan are in the Breadalbane Folklore Centre in Killin. The six links of the chain from the Holy Pool that bound the mentally ill are in the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum. The Holy Pool itself still exists at Strathfillan, quiet now, unchanged.
Innis Bhuidhe with its Iron Age forts and nine MacNab chiefs is accessible from Killin. The Old Village of Lawers on the north shore of Loch Tay is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. The north shore road along Loch Tay passes within sight of where the Lady of Lawers lived, prophesied, and is said to walk still.
And the MacNab plant badge, the stone bramble or common heath, grows wild across all of this ground. It has always grown here. It will continue to grow here. The land does not forget.
The entrance to the MacNab burial ground, Innis Bhuidhe, Killin
