MacLeod: A Clan History: From the Highlands to New World

From a single name spoken on the cliffs of Skye in the thirteenth century to households on five continents today, the MacLeods have held their ground for eight hundred years.The clan began with Leod, a Norse-Gaelic chief whose two sons founded the twin houses of Siol Tormod, of Harris and Dunvegan, and Siol Torquil, of Lewis. From those island strongholds the MacLeods built a kingdom of weather and stone. They fought beside and against the Lords of the Isles, kept the bull's-head banner flying through Reformation, Civil War, and Jacobite rising, and watched the old order vanish at Culloden. The Clearances and the emigrant ships that followed carried the name across the Atlantic to Cape Breton and Pictou, across the Pacific to Otago and Waipu, into the Cape and the American South. The Clan Parliament at Dunvegan still convenes every four years; the Fairy Flag still hangs in its case; the motto Hold Fast still means what it has always meant.This volume traces the MacLeods from the Norse seaways to the digital age: the founding chiefs, the wars and feuds, the great age of Gaelic patronage under Iain Breac, the betrayals and survivals of the eighteenth century, the Clearances on Skye and Raasay, the emigrant voyages from the Hector onward, and the institutions that now bind the worldwide diaspora to a single grey castle on a Hebridean loch. It is written for those who carry the name today, and for anyone who has wondered how a small island family put down roots from Nova Scotia to New Zealand.To carry the name MacLeod is not to inherit a myth. It is to inherit the long habit of holding on.