A Complete Chronicle
The History of Clan MacNab
From the first King of Scotland to the Ottawa Valley. Nine hundred years of blood, honour, and endurance.
A Complete Chronicle
From the first King of Scotland to the Ottawa Valley. Nine hundred years of blood, honour, and endurance.
The story of Clan MacNab is not a footnote in Scottish history. It is woven into the founding of Scotland itself. To understand the MacNabs, the Macnabs, the McNabs, the McNabbs, is to understand the deep roots of the Highland world: its sacred ground, its warrior code, its cycles of glory and loss, and its extraordinary power of survival.
What follows is a complete account. It begins before the clan existed, in a world of warring kingdoms and Norse invasions. It ends in the present day, with a living chieftainship and a name carried across every continent. Read it in full and you will know this clan as few outside of it do.
Chapter One
Kenneth MacAlpin — King of the Picts and Scots — 810 to 858 AD
Before there was a Clan MacNab, before there was a Scotland, there was one man who changed the entire shape of the known world north of the Forth. His name was Kenneth MacAlpin, known in Medieval Gaelic as Cináed mac Ailpín. He was born around 810 AD, most likely on the island of Iona, birthplace of Scottish Christianity and the sacred burial ground of kings. His father was Alpín mac Echdach, King of Dál Riata, the Gaelic kingdom that stretched across what is now Argyll on the west coast of Scotland and into northeastern Ireland. It was a world defined by Viking raids, fractured loyalties, and two peoples who had coexisted, fought, and intermarried for centuries but had never been one.
Those two peoples were the Gaels of Dál Riata and the Picts. The Picts were the ancient people of the north, occupying most of what we now call Scotland above the Forth and Clyde. They had their own language, their own royal houses, and a culture of fierce independence. The Gaels were their western neighbours, Gaelic-speaking and politically organized around the kingship of Dál Riata. For generations the two had been rivals. Kenneth was born into this divided world.
In 839 AD, history shifted violently. A massive Norse force drove deep into Pictish territory and shattered the Pictish army in a catastrophic engagement. The Pictish king Eogain mac Oengusa was killed. The Pictish king Bran was killed. Most of the great noble families of the Pictish heartland were wiped out in a single campaign. The seven royal houses of the Picts were left without clear leadership, their political structure effectively decapitated.
Iona Abbey — where Kenneth MacAlpin was buried, 858 AD
Kenneth MacAlpin at a Glance
Kenneth inherited the crown of Dál Riata from his father around 841 AD. Through his mother, who is believed to have been a Pictish princess, he also held a blood claim to the Pictish throne. Into the power vacuum left by the Viking destruction of the Pictish nobility, Kenneth moved with decisive speed. By 843 AD he had been acknowledged as King of the Picts. By 848 AD his grip on both kingdoms was absolute. He was the first ruler of the House of Alpin, the dynasty that would become the foundation of Scottish kingship for the next two centuries.
He made his capital at Forteviot, a royal settlement five miles southwest of present-day Perth, deep in Perthshire. This is not incidental. The MacNab homeland of Glen Dochart lies in the same great county. He moved the sacred Stone of Destiny from the ancient Dál Riatan stronghold of Dunadd to Scone, placing the symbol of royal inauguration at the heart of his new united kingdom. He launched six recorded raids into Lothian, burning Dunbar and destroying Melrose. He fought the Britons of Strathclyde and the Norse who threatened from the west. He consolidated what had never before been consolidated.
He died on 8 February 858 AD at Forteviot. He was buried on Iona, in the manner of the sacred kings of Dál Riata, beside the church of Columba. It was the only fitting resting place for the man who had united his people. Every Scottish king who followed traces the line back to him through the House of Alpin. He was given, posthumously, the Gaelic epithet An Ferbasach.
"An Ferbasach. The Conqueror. The man who made Scotland."
Historians are careful to note that the formal title King of Scotland did not come until his descendant Donald II, who became the first ruler to formally bear the title King of Alba in 900 AD. Technically, Kenneth held the titles King of Dál Riata and King of the Picts. But every Scottish king who followed traces the line through him. The dynasty he founded held the Scottish kingship from 843 to 1034 AD. In every meaningful sense, Kenneth MacAlpin was the man who made Scotland possible. And in every meaningful sense, the blood of Clan MacNab, McNab, McNabb, and Macnab traces back through the centuries to him.
Chapter Two
The Royal Line to Glendochart — The Tradition of Abraruadh
The connection between Kenneth MacAlpin and Clan MacNab runs through a single, extraordinary claim. By clan tradition, recorded in genealogical records and repeated consistently across centuries of Highland history, the founding progenitor of the MacNab line was a man named Abraruadh. He was, the tradition holds, a younger son of Kenneth MacAlpin himself: a prince of the House of Alpin who did not inherit his father's crown but was given stewardship of another kind. He became the Abbot of Glendochart and Strathearn, a hereditary religious and civil leader of the great Highland glen in Perthshire that would become the clan's eternal home.
In the Celtic Christian church of that era, unlike in Rome, abbots were not bound by celibacy. They married. They had children. Their sons inherited the abbacy. This was not unusual in the early Scottish church: hereditary abbacies were a recognized institution, and the office of abbot carried both spiritual authority and very real temporal power over land and people. Over successive generations, the Abbot of Glendochart became a dynasty in his own right. The title and the land passed from father to son, as in any noble house.
It is important to be honest about the nature of this tradition. No 9th-century document survives naming Abraruadh as Kenneth's son. Records from 843 AD Scotland were not written on durable paper in institutional archives. They were spoken, memorized, and passed through generations of clan remembrance and bardic tradition. The same is true of almost every Highland royal descent claim of that era. What exists is consistent, independent clan genealogical record stretching back centuries, all pointing to the same origin. The descent cannot be proven in the modern documentary sense. It is equally true that it has never been seriously contested, and it is entirely consistent with everything else known about the clan's origins and geographical position.
"From the blood of the Conqueror of Scotland, the abbots of Glendochart were born. This is what the clan has always known."
What is confirmed by modern genealogical scholarship is that the MacNab line descends from the Cenél Loairn, a senior branch of Dál Riata. This is the same lineage as the House of Alpin. The MacNabs, the MacDougalls, and the earliest Scottish kings all share this ancient Gaelic root. The geographical evidence supports it too: Kenneth's capital of Forteviot was in Perthshire, the heart of what would become MacNab territory. An abbot of Glendochart with royal Dál Riatan blood is entirely plausible for that time and place.
By tradition, the founding line runs: Kenneth MacAlpin, first King of the Scots and Picts, to Abraruadh, Abbot of Glendochart, to the hereditary abbots of the glen, to the clan chiefs of MacNab. From a king who forged a nation to a family who held a Highland glen for nearly a thousand years. The name that grew from this lineage was natural and inevitable: Mac an Aba. Son of the Abbot.
It is also worth noting that the clan belongs to a larger ancient grouping. The MacNabs are members of Siol Alpin (the Seed of Alpin), a confederation of clans all claiming descent from the Alpin dynasty. The other members include the MacGregors, MacKinnons, Grants, MacQuarries, and MacAulays. All share this common royal root. The MacNabs sit within this ancient brotherhood of blood as one of its founding members.
Chapter Three
St Fillan of Glendochart — 7th Century
Before the clan held the glen by sword, a saint had already consecrated it. Long before Abraruadh became the first MacNab abbot, the ground of Glendochart had been made sacred by one of the most celebrated holy men in Scotland. His name was Fillan of Glendochart, and he came to this remote Highland pass in the 7th century with a mission that would shape everything that followed.
Fillan was Irish, of royal blood. His mother was St Kentigerna, daughter of an Irish prince of Munster. His father was Feriach, of ancient Dál Riatan lineage, the same royal house from which the MacNab line ultimately descends. He came to Glendochart as a missionary of the Celtic Christian tradition, carrying the same spiritual fire that had brought Columba to Iona a century before. He built his monastery and his priory in Strathfillan, the valley that runs southwest from Crianlarich into Glen Dochart, naming the entire area with his presence.
The stories of Fillan are extraordinary. He was said to possess a hand that glowed with supernatural light, allowing him to write scripture after dark without a candle. A wolf killed his ox while he ploughed; Fillan commanded the wolf to take the dead animal's place in the yoke, and the wolf obeyed and ploughed the field. He fought and drove off a wild boar that terrorized the region near Killin. He healed the sick with sacred stones, eight of which remained in the area and were turned in the river each Christmas Eve by local tradition for centuries. His crozier, the Quigrich, and his bronze bell, the Bernane, became objects of tremendous power and reverence after his death.
St Fillan's Priory — Strathfillan, Glen Dochart
The power of St Fillan did not diminish after death. In 1314, Robert the Bruce carried the Quigrich with him to the Battle of Bannockburn. The night before the battle, the silver crozier was found open in its case, having apparently moved on its own. Bruce took this as a sign of divine support. He won Bannockburn. He credited St Fillan. He subsequently founded a priory at Strathfillan to honour the saint, the ruins of which can be visited in Glen Dochart today.
The MacNabs were not merely neighbours to this sacred ground. They were its hereditary guardians. A branch of the clan known as the Dewars were the custodians of St Fillan's relics, a role recognized and formalized in a royal document by King James III in 1487. In 1818, one of the Dewar family emigrated to Canada, taking the Quigrich with him. For decades the most sacred relic of St Fillan sat in Ontario. It was eventually returned to Scotland in 1877 and now rests in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
The clan's founding abbots were the abbots of Glendochart itself, the same monastery St Fillan had built. The MacNab name grew from the same sacred soil that Fillan had consecrated. This is the spiritual inheritance of every person who carries the name.
Chapter Four
The Birth of the Clan — 1124 AD
By the 12th century, the abbots of Glendochart had been a Highland dynasty for generations. Their name had formed naturally from what they were: Mac an Aba. Son of the Abbot. In the Gaelic of the Highland world, this became MacNab, Macnab, McNab. The same root, the same people, the same glen.
The first written documentary evidence of the name appears in 1124 AD, during the reign of King David I of Scotland. That date marks the earliest recorded moment in which the MacNab presence in Glendochart can be confirmed in surviving documents. But the family had been established in the area long before that. The abbacy of Glendochart was ancient, and the hereditary lineage behind it older still.
The MacNab homeland was a specific and defined territory. It stretched from the southwestern shores of Loch Tay, the great freshwater loch that dominates central Perthshire, westward to the village of Tyndrum at the head of Glen Dochart. It was Gaelic-speaking, mountain-guarded on all sides, and deeply tied to the sacred legacy of St Fillan. The chiefs of MacNab were at once the spiritual and temporal lords of this ground.
At the heart of their power stood Eilean Ran, a small island castle commanding the mouth of the River Lochay where it enters Loch Tay at Killin. The castle controlled the Port of Ran, the strategic crossing point between the loch and the glen. In the medieval Highland world, where movement of people and goods flowed through defined passes and water routes, this was a position of genuine military and commercial power. The MacNabs did not merely live here. They controlled here.
The MacNab Name Variants
The MacNabs were also part of a larger ancient clan grouping. As members of Siol Alpin, they shared blood and political kinship with clans including the MacGregors, the MacKinnons, the Grants, the MacQuarries, and the MacAulays. All descended from the same royal Dál Riatan root. The MacNabs were never isolated. They were embedded in one of the oldest kinship networks in Scotland.
For the next century and a half, the MacNabs consolidated their power in Glen Dochart. Their chiefs received royal recognition. Their lands were formally acknowledged. Their abbacy continued. By the early 13th century, they were one of the established noble families of Perthshire, with a castle, a defined territory, and a lineage stretching back to the founding of the Scottish kingdom. Then came the Wars of Independence. And everything changed.
Chapter Five
War, Betrayal, and the Loss of the Lands — 1306 to 1336
The MacNabs in the early 14th century were a powerful clan. Their mistake, if it can be called that, was a matter of loyalty: they chose the wrong side in the most consequential power struggle in Scottish history. It was not disloyalty to Scotland that undid them. It was loyalty to their kin in a country that was genuinely and bitterly divided.
Scotland in 1306 was torn between two great noble factions competing for the throne following the death of the last recognized king. The Bruces and the Comyns were the two most powerful families in Scotland. The MacNabs were connected to the Comyns by marriage. Angus MacNab was the brother-in-law of John Comyn of Badenoch, the most powerful man in Scotland and the chief rival to Robert the Bruce for the crown. The MacNabs, like many clans, chose family and feudal obligation. They aligned with the Comyns and their allies, the MacDougalls of Lorne.
On 10 February 1306, Robert the Bruce killed John Comyn in the Church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries. It was a political murder committed at a sacred site. Within weeks, Bruce seized the Scottish crown and began his campaign to unite the kingdom under his rule. For the MacNabs, this was a catastrophe. Their closest political ally had been killed by the man who was now king.
Scottish Highland castle ruins — the world the MacNabs fought to defend
Later in 1306, Bruce's army was defeated by the MacDougalls at the Battle of Dalrigh near Tyndrum, at the very western edge of MacNab territory. The MacNabs and their allies held the field that day. But the long war went to Bruce. By 1309, Bruce had defeated the MacDougalls. By 1314, after Bannockburn, his kingship was unquestioned. The reckoning for those who had opposed him came swiftly.
The MacNab lands were stripped. Their charters and title documents were destroyed, deliberately and systematically. Centuries of accumulated rights, grants, and recorded history were erased. The only piece of the original territory that survived was the barony of Bovain in the heart of Glendochart. Everything else was gone.
For over thirty years the MacNabs endured as a diminished clan, holding only what they could not be stripped of entirely. Then, in 1336, the political tide shifted. King David II, the son of Robert the Bruce, issued a royal charter to Gilbert MacNab, granting him the barony of Bovain. The Lord Lyon, Scotland's heraldic authority, later recognized Gilbert as the first undisputed chief of Clan MacNab. The legal foundation was re-laid. From that single barony in the glen, everything that followed was rebuilt.
"They stripped our lands, burned our charters, and took everything but the ground we stood on. We stood on it."
This period also produced one of the more remarkable details in MacNab history. When Bruce's victorious troops ravaged the MacNab lands, they destroyed all the family writs and title documents. This destruction was deliberate: without legal documents, a family had no proof of their historical claims. It was the medieval equivalent of erasing a public record. That the MacNabs survived this erasure and rebuilt their position over the following century speaks to the depth of their roots in Glendochart. The land itself was their title.
Chapter Six
The Great Feud with Clan MacNeish — 1522 and 1612
No story in the entire history of Clan MacNab is more celebrated, more brutal, or more defining than the feud with Clan MacNeish. It produced the clan crest. It produced the motto. It has been told in Highland firesides for four hundred years. It is entirely true.
The MacNeishes were a clan who occupied a stronghold on a small island in Loch Earn, south of MacNab territory across the hills. They had long been notorious raiders, preying on surrounding clans and travellers from the security of their island refuge, which made pursuit and retaliation difficult. Their island was their fortress and their shield.
The feud reached its first decisive climax at the Battle of Glenboultachan around 1522. Chief Finlay MacNab, the 8th Laird, led his forces south from Loch Tay through the passes toward St Fillans and the upper reaches of Loch Earn. The two clans met in the glen. The fighting was savage. The MacNeish chief and the majority of his fighting men were killed. The MacNab clan poet MacCallum Glas later recorded that he managed to drag only twenty survivors back to the island refuge on Loch Earn.
The MacNeish clan was broken but not finished. The survivors retreated to their island and remained there, reduced in number but not in viciousness. Over the following decades they continued to raid and steal from the surrounding area, taking advantage of their island position to strike and withdraw with impunity. A red lichen-covered stone in the glen is said to mark the spot where the MacNeish chief fell in 1522. It can still be found.
Ninety years later, just before Christmas 1612, the chief of Clan MacNab dispatched a party of servants to the town of Crieff to collect provisions and drink for the festive season. The servants loaded garron ponies with food and whisky and set out on the long return journey through Comrie and up toward Glendochart. Somewhere along the route, the MacNeishes ambushed them. They stripped the servants of everything, took the provisions, and sent them back empty-handed. It was understood as a deliberate humiliation.
When the servants arrived home and reported what had happened, the MacNab chief looked at his twelve sons. His words, in Gaelic and later translated into the Scottish tradition, became one of the most famous lines in Highland history:
"Oidhche mhath na'n robh na gillean rium."
"The night is the night, if the lads were the lads."
The twelve sons understood immediately. The eldest, Iain Min MacNab, known in English as Smooth John (a name ironic because he was said to be anything but smooth: a giant of a man and a ferocious fighter), took the challenge. That night, the twelve brothers carried a boat on their shoulders from Loch Tay up over a 2,000-foot mountain pass through snow and darkness, down into Glen Achern, and to the shore of Loch Earn. The Black Watch territorials who attempted to recreate this feat in 1965 confirmed it was physically possible, if extraordinary.
The twelve crossed Loch Earn in darkness and guided their boat into a burn on the island. Inside the MacNeish stronghold, the surviving clansmen were drunk and gorged from the stolen provisions. The twelve MacNabs fell upon them. Every MacNeish on the island was killed, with the exception of two who managed to hide under a bed and survived to tell the tale. Smooth John's brothers brought back the head of the MacNeish chief.
When Smooth John returned to Eilean Ran, he announced himself to the night lookout with the words: "Fear Nought." The MacNeish head was placed before his father. The piper played the Pibroch of Victory. It was Christmas morning.
That severed head became the MacNab clan crest. It is there to this day on every crest badge, every document, every piece of clan heraldry. The motto Timor Omnis Abesto (Let Fear Be Far From All) was confirmed as the expression of that night's deed. The MacNeishes as a clan never recovered.
Chapter Seven
Royalists, Civil War, and the Jacobite Divide — 1644 to 1746
Smooth John MacNab did not only avenge the Christmas ambush. He went on to become one of the most significant MacNab military figures of the 17th century, fighting not just clan feuds but the great civil and religious wars that tore Scotland apart. The MacNabs through this era were staunch Royalists, defenders of the House of Stuart against both the English Parliamentarians and the Scottish Covenanters.
When James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose raised the Royalist standard in Scotland in 1644, Smooth John MacNab answered the call. He fought alongside Montrose in the brilliant Highland campaign that produced a string of stunning Royalist victories. After the MacNabs fought at the Battle of Kilsyth on 15 August 1645, one of Montrose's most complete victories, Smooth John was appointed to garrison Montrose's own castle at Kincardine. The Royalist general David Leslie subsequently laid siege to the castle. Smooth John held it as long as he could before it fell.
The MacNabs continued to fight with Montrose through the collapse of the Royalist cause. Chief John MacNab fell at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, the final engagement of Charles II's Scottish campaign, surrounded by his kinsmen. He died in service to the king. The child he left behind, Alexander MacNab, was only four years old when he became the 9th Laird.
Doune Castle — where Chief John MacNab was imprisoned, 1745
The Jacobite uprisings of the 18th century presented a crueller test: not unity but division. By 1745, the clan was internally split. The chief, John MacNab, held a commission in the Black Watch Regiment, the government force raised from Highland clans loyal to the Hanoverian crown. He fought at the Battle of Prestonpans on 21 September 1745, where the Jacobite army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart destroyed the government forces in a seven-minute engagement. MacNab was captured. He was held prisoner at Doune Castle until after the Battle of Culloden in April 1746.
But other MacNabs were not beside him. Allister MacNab of Inshewan and Archibald MacNab of Acharne supported the House of Stuart and fought with the Jacobite forces. The clan name appeared on both sides of Scotland's last civil war. That division was not weakness. It was a reflection of how genuinely divided the Highland world had become on the question of who should rule.
The defeat at Culloden in April 1746 ended the Jacobite cause permanently. The Highland way of life that followed, with the Disarming Acts, the Proscription of the Tartan, and the eventual Clearances, transformed Scotland beyond recognition. For the MacNabs, the consequences would be felt most severely in the generation that followed.
Chapter Eight
Francis MacNab, 16th Laird — 1734 to 1816
In 1802, Sir Henry Raeburn, the greatest portrait painter Scotland has ever produced, stood in front of a man and made a painting that captured something irreplaceable. The subject was Francis MacNab, 16th Laird and Chief of Clan MacNab. The painting now hangs in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. It is one of the finest portraits in Scottish history, and the man in it looks like exactly what he was: the last great Highland chief of the ancient kind.
Francis stands against a Highland pass under a stormy sky. He is dressed in full Highland military dress: a green jacket with silver braid, a red tartan vest, MacNab tartan kilt and stockings, a badger-head sporran, and a bonnet of tall black and white feathers. His right hand rests near his pistol. His dirk and broadsword are at his side. His expression is one of absolute, settled authority. He is in his late sixties and he looks unconquerable.
In reality, Francis MacNab was already living beyond his means. He maintained Kinnell House, the MacNab seat near Killin, with the full extravagance of the old Highland hospitality, entertaining generously on a scale that his finances could not sustain. He never married. He left no direct heir. When he died in 1816, he left behind debts of over £35,000, an enormous sum for the time.
Francis MacNab — portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn, 1802
Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow
The estate passed to his nephew Archibald, but it was already lost. A writ of foreclosure was issued in 1823. The Kinnell estate, home of the MacNab chiefs for generations, passed to creditors. Even the beloved burial ground of Inch Buidhe on the Falls of Dochart, the sacred island where nine clan chiefs lay buried, was sold to the Earl of Breadalbane. The ancient MacNab burial ground passed out of clan hands.
At that moment, a prophecy that had long circulated in Glen Dochart was said to have come true. The Lady of Lawers was a prophetess who had lived on the southern shore of Loch Tay in the 17th century. She made numerous predictions about the great families of the area, many of which were said to have been fulfilled. Among them was this: that when a fir tree on Inch Buidhe fell against another and grafted onto it, the MacNabs would be finished in the land of their fathers.
The tree fell. The estate was sold. The great era of MacNab power in Glendochart came to an end.
"The tree fell. And with it, the last of the old world ended."
Chapter Nine
The Flight to Canada — 1822 to 1860
Archibald MacNab, 17th Chief of Clan MacNab, was born around 1781 in Bovain, Glen Dochart. He was the nephew of Francis MacNab, the man in the Raeburn portrait, and he inherited not a clan seat but a debt. The foreclosure of 1823 left him with nothing but his title, his name, and his bearing. In 1822 he fled Scotland ahead of his creditors and sailed for Upper Canada.
What he did in Canada was remarkable in its audacity. Through sheer force of personality and the weight of his Highland title, he befriended Governor-General Sir Peregrine Maitland and secured a grant of 81,000 acres in the Ottawa River Valley. The township was surveyed in 1824 and named McNab. He named his house Kinnell, after the home he had lost in Scotland.
In 1825, approximately 500 men, women, and children of the clan followed him across the Atlantic. They sailed to Montreal, portaged around the Lachine Rapids, boarded flat-bottomed bateaux on the St Lawrence, and arrived at the Ottawa River three days later. The MacNabs had left Scotland. But they had not disappeared.
Archibald MacNab, 17th Chief — unknown artist, c.1830
Archibald MacNab was a complicated man in a complicated situation. He maintained feudal authority over his settlers in a way that belonged to the old Highland world, not the new Canadian one. He demanded rents and labor from clansmen who had been told they were coming to free Crown land. When the settlers discovered the arrangement, the relationship collapsed into legal dispute and bitter resentment. By 1838, his vision of buying back the Scottish ancestral lands had definitively failed. His authority over the settlers was being dismantled through the Canadian courts.
He eventually fled Canada too, as he had fled Scotland. He died on 12 August 1860 in Lannion, France, far from Glen Dochart and far from Ontario, with no clear successor to the chieftainship. The line of chiefs became uncertain. Multiple branches of the family pressed their claims over the following decades.
But Archibald's legacy was real and lasting in Canada. The Township of McNab, now part of McNab-Braeside Township in Renfrew County, Ontario, still exists. The name is still on the map. Canadian descendants of the clan number in the tens of thousands. The Scottish diaspora that followed Archibald's catastrophic leadership still carries the name McNabb, MacNab, and McNab across Ontario, across Canada, across North America. The name proved more durable than the man.
Chapter Ten
The Sacred Ground That Remained — Killin, Perthshire
Of everything the MacNabs once held, one thing remained. Through the foreclosure, through the Canada years, through the long uncertainty of succession, one piece of MacNab ground endured.
Innis Bhuidhe. The Yellow Island. A small rocky islet in the River Dochart at Killin, just below the Falls of Dochart, accessible across the old stone bridge that the clan has walked for centuries. It is the most beautifully situated burial ground in Scotland, and possibly the most significant in terms of its concentration of clan history in one small place.
The MacNab burial ground on Innis Bhuidhe contains the graves of nine clan chiefs. Among them is a late medieval West Highland warrior effigy, one of only two such examples known to exist outside Argyll and the Hebrides. The gravestone carvings invariably depict a severed human head, the head of the MacNeish chief, the same image that forms the clan crest. Even in death, the MacNeish feud is present.
The island is older than the clan. Archaeological excavations have identified the foundations of two Iron Age forts at its centre, both scheduled as ancient monuments. The western end of the island is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Two carved stone busts from the 18th century sit atop the enclosure walls, watching over the buried chiefs.
The stone bridge at Killin — gateway to Innis Bhuidhe and the MacNab burial ground
The island passed out of MacNab hands during the foreclosure of 1823, sold to the Earl of Breadalbane. It passed through various ownerships over the following century and a half. Then in 1987, the 23rd Chief, John MacNab of MacNab, gifted the island to the MacNab Memorial Trust, ensuring that it would remain in MacNab ownership in perpetuity. The chain of custody was restored. The chiefs' graves are MacNab ground again.
The keys to the iron gate of the burial enclosure are kept in the village library of Killin. Anyone can request them. You can walk across the old bridge, stand on the island in the Falls of Dochart, and look down at the graves of the clan chiefs. The carved heads on the gravestones look back.
"One clan chief, wooing his intended bride, offered her this: the right to be buried on Innis Bhuidhe. He considered it the greatest honour he could bestow."
Chapter Eleven
The Clan Today — From 1954 to the Present
After Archibald MacNab died in France in 1860, the chieftainship of Clan MacNab fell into uncertainty. He had no clear male heir. Multiple branches of the family, spread across Scotland, Canada, and beyond, held competing claims. For nearly a century the question of who held the legitimate chieftainship was unresolved.
In 1954, the Lord Lyon King of Arms, Scotland's heraldic authority and the legal arbiter of clan chieftainship, examined the succession in full. After thorough investigation of the competing claims, the Lyon recognized a new line. The chieftainship was formally restored. The 22nd Chief was recognized. The legal continuity of the clan was re-established after ninety years of uncertainty.
The clan was formally organized in the modern sense during the 20th century. The Clan Macnab Society was established to maintain records, organize gatherings, support clan heritage projects, and connect MacNabs worldwide. Annual clan gatherings have brought together descendants from across the UK, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. The family connections forged in the Glen and in the Ottawa Valley continue to bind people across continents.
Today the clan is led by the 24th Chief, James "Jamie" William McNab of Macnab. The chieftainship is recognized by the Lord Lyon. The Clan Macnab Society maintains the official website and records at clanmacnabsociety.com.
The Clan MacNab Today
The name MacNab has spread across every continent. In Canada, the descendants of the 1825 settlers number in the tens of thousands in Ontario and beyond. In the United States, the McNabb and MacNabb spellings are widespread, particularly across the eastern seaboard and the south. In Australia and New Zealand, the name arrived with 19th century emigration. In Scotland itself, the name remains in the Killin area where it was born.
What connects all of them is not geography or language or even a shared memory of specific events. It is something older: a Gaelic word, Mac an Aba, meaning Son of the Abbot, first spoken in a Highland glen in Perthshire in the early centuries of the Scottish kingdom. Spoken first by a hereditary abbot who traced his blood, by tradition, to the man who had forged Scotland itself.
From 843 AD to today. From Kenneth MacAlpin to Jamie McNab. From the stone castle of Eilean Ran to the Ottawa Valley. From Raeburn's magnificent portrait to gravestones carved with severed heads in the Falls of Dochart.
The motto is the same. The crest is the same. The ground at Killin is MacNab ground still.
"Timor Omnis Abesto."
Let fear be far from all. It has always been so.
