Mac Kay History

The Mac Kay country was the most remote from the seat of government of any part of the Scottish mainland. It extended from Cape Wrath along the north coast to the Caithness border, and varied between sixteen and twenty miles in depth, its southern frontiers defended by bleak uplands and splendid mountains. In 1427 it was estimated that the Chief of Mac Kay possessed 4,000 fighting men with whom to defend this province, called Strathnaver, after the largest river that flows through it. Until the 17th century every known marriage of a Chief of Mac Kay was with a member of the Scottish Gaelic aristocracy: and one of them was with a sister of the Lord of the Isles who led his Highland host to Harlaw in 1411. A hundred years later a clerk (as he described himself) of the northern Highlands wrote a vivid description of his society, by then labelled 'Irish' in the Lowlands. 'The great courtiers of Scotland repute the foresaid Irish lords as wild, rude and barbarous people, brought up (as they say) without learning and nurture: yet they pass them a great deal in faith, honesty, in policy and wit, in good order and civility.' One of those great courtiers, Adam Gordon, had just seized the neighbouring earldom of Sutherland, and Strathnaver was the next Gordon target. In 1588, by violence, fraud and the abuse of royal authority, the first Mac Kay Chief was reduced to the status of feudal vassal to a Gordon Earl. His great body of clansmen was at once conscripted to assault the next Gordon target - the Sinclair earldom of Caithness. But Donald, Chief of Mac Kay, found other service for his clansmen when 1626 he took a regiment of three thousand men to fight on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War. At Stettin the earliest portraits of Mac Kays Highlanders were published in 1631.
Donald, Chief of Mac Kay had been raised to the peerage as Lord Reay in 1628, and throughout the 18th century the Hanoverian Reay in country remained unmolested. Its ancient way of life was preserved forever in the poetry of Rob Donn Mac Kay (1714-1778), the most graphic of all Gaelic poets in his detailed delineation of social relationships, everyday occupations and human aspirations. In his songs and his satires, Robb Donn is the only Gaelic poet comparable to his contemporary Robert Burns. The world so soon to be destroyed in the Sutherland Clearances of the early 19th century is commemorated in a language that fewer and fewer are able to understand. But his poetry has been presented in English translation in Ian Grimble's The World of Rob Donn (1979).