Articles on Scottish history by Peter Lawrie FSAScot

Articles on the history of Clan Gregor

Miscellaneous articles on aspects of Scottish History

The history of one's native land is a vital part of understanding who we are and how we got here.

As my various jottings had become somewhat disorganized, I have rearranged them into the three headings above. Please feel free to comment by emailing me at peter.lawrie@glendiscovery.co.uk

Having spent my career in IT, I am only an amateur historian but with an interest in Scottish and particularly Highland History since I was a teenager. The various essays on this website have been written for all sorts of reasons over a period of more than thirty years.

History teaching at Inverness Royal Academy in the early 1960s, beyond Bruce and his apocryphal spider, like all other Scottish secondary schools was essentially dedicated to British (ie English, London-centred) history. Any interest in peculiarly Scottish history, as I found at St Andrews University was regarded as an aberration and not to be encouraged. The late Marinell Ash was an American research student in St Andrews in 1969, she wrote a paper on the 'Strange death of Scottish History', which was later published as a book in 1980. What she meant was that Scottish History as a discipline had not only been discouraged but had largely been abandoned to folklorists and romanticists because of the overwhelming 'Britishness' of the academic community. In the 1960s, only Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities had Professors specialising in Scottish History - Archibald Duncan and Gordon Donaldson. Ambitious academics were discouraged from specialisation in Scottish subjects. St Andrews had Doctor Ronald Cant, a wonderful man whose brilliant lectures I always enjoyed, but he was never promoted beyond being a 'Reader in Scottish History'. Today, every Scottish University (and we now have fifteen, instead of the four when I went to St Andrews has one or more Professors of Scottish History.

Unbelievably, only since 2011, has the teaching of specifically Scottish History, although still only as an extension of ''British'' history become a requirement in Scottish schools. I recall visiting the High School of Dundee parents' evenings for my two children and having had to enquire of the history teacher on both occasions why the school's teaching of the Parliamentary Reform of 1832 still featured Old Sarum and the usual English examples, when we were situated in a burgh with one of the most corrupt pre-1832 local and parliamentary franchises - even the very street in Dundee, at the head of which the High School sits, is named 'Reform Street'.

I have researched for many years my own family origins, finding that I represent a fusion of the different genetic contributions to the Highlanders plus an admixture of the North of England.

Lawrie - John Lawrie, my father, has given me my surname and a Y-chromosome whose closest matches in the current FTDNA genetic database are in the Netherlands. Perhaps we descend from one of the Flemish settlers which King David I brought to the east of Scotland in the 12th century. The furthest back I could trace his line was possibly to Banff in the 17th century and, following King Billie's ill years of the 1690s, in the farming communities of western Aberdeenshire. John Lawrie, my ancestor, left Turriff for Tillicoultry at the start of the 19th century and his grandson, also John Lawrie, moved to Rochdale in the 1870s where he married a great granddaughter of David Hartley, "King of the Yorkshire coiners" who had been hanged in 1770 for his crimes.

MacGregor - My father's mother was Laurie Helen MacGregor, born in Cheshire in 1884. I traced her ancestry back to Duncan MacGregor who had a son, Alexander, baptised in Bishop Wearmouth, Northumberland in 1776. Alexander became the bailiff of Lord Westminster's Eaton estate. After many years, a Y-DNA match connected my Duncan to Braemar, where he had been baptised at a Catholic chapel in 1731. His ancestor was Duncan MacGregor of Ardochie, probably the first MacGregor to settle in upland Braemar in the 1620s following the proscription of Clan Gregor in 1603. He had come from MacGregor of Roro in Glen Lyon. A Y-DNA test by my cousin in Australia proved our connection to Gregor, the eponym of Clan Gregor, and his Gaelic and Dalriadic royal origins.

In 2002, I did a part-time MPhil at the University of Dundee for which my dissertation was on the subject of the Clan Gregor between 1583 and 1611, a period which saw the clan as a whole proscribed, hunted down with the authority of the state and any survivors forbidden the use of their name. Needless to say, as I have been for almost thirty years, Vice-Chairman of the Clan Gregor Society, the proscription which lasted until 1774, failed in its ultimate objective of the destruction of the MacGregors.

MacLeod - As a result of a Y-DNA test by my mother's brother, Duncan MacLeod, I discovered that our line was of Scandinavian origin, descending from the Viking settlers in the Western Islands who became Clan MacLeod. In our case, they had moved from Lewis to Assynt in the 15th century. In the late 17th century when the chiefly family of Assynt lost their lands to the MacKenzies of Kintail, our ancestor moved - possibly from Elphin in Assynt - to Kildonan in East Sutherland. According to FTDNA.com, our genetic Y-DNA signature is most common on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic. As Christina, my daughter, is a classical concert pianist, we were most interested to discover from FTDNA that we share a genetic origin with Ludwig van Beethoven!
Mitochondrial DNA follows the maternal line. Mine is also of Viking origin. I traced back, as far as I could, from my mother, to hers, and so on to an 18th century woman in the extreme North West of England, the area which, the geneticists tell us experienced the highest level of Viking settlement in England.

I have a long-standing interest in the Highland Clearances - na fuadaichean - and particularly in the Strath of Kildonan. My MacLeod great-great-great-grandparents were cleared in 1819 from their farm at Elderable in the lower part of the Strath, about 4 miles from Helmsdale. My Great Grandfather, Joseph MacLeod was a leading campaigner in the Sutherland Association and the Highland Land League in the 1880s and 1890s.
Is treasa tuath na tighearna.