03/09/2026
Seven Macleans died one after another so that a single man could live, and each one said the same four words as he stepped forward. 🏴
The place was Inverkeithing in Fife, the date the twentieth of July 1651. Sir Hector Maclean of Duart, called Eachann Ruadh nan Cath, Red Hector of the Battles, had brought around eight hundred of his clansmen south to fight for Charles II against Cromwell's army. The Scottish force was outmatched and the day was going badly. Hector was surrounded.
What is said to have happened next is remembered in Gaelic in four words. Fear eile airson Eachainn. Another for Hector. One clansman after another put himself bodily between his chief and the blades coming for him, and as each one fell the next stepped up and said it again. Seven of them, according to the tradition, and by some accounts all of them brothers. Hector died anyway. So did the great majority of the Macleans on that field. Of the eight hundred who marched out of Mull, fewer than forty came home.
Duart Castle sits on its black rock at the mouth of the Sound of Mull and it has watched almost everything. The Macleans held it from the fourteenth century. They lost it, along with nearly all of Mull, in the long ruin that followed the Jacobite years, and by the nineteenth century the place was a roofless shell used as a store. The clan motto is Virtue Mine Honour. That is a strange thing to keep saying once the land is gone.
Then in 1911 Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the twenty sixth chief, by then in his late eighties, bought the ruin back and restored it. Macleans came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States to stand in it. They still come.
A clan is not a castle and it is not a hillside. It is a promise that somebody will step forward. 🪻 The blood remembers.
