The Brahan Seer, Kenneth MacKenzie

This remarkable personage was born at Baile-na-Cille, in the parish of Uig, Island of Lewis, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. He was gifted with wonderful powers of divination and second-sight, said to have been due to the possession of a wonderful stone given to him by fairy agency. Coinneach Odhar’s prophecies are well known in Ross-shire and the neighbourhood, and whatever, in these enlightened days, may be thought and said about second-sight, there is no room for doubt that many of the predictions of the Brahan Seer regarding future events and the fate of well-known families have been fulfilled centuries after he had given utterance to them. Several of his prophecies have still to be fulfilled. During the reign of the third Earl of Seaforth the unfortunate Coinneach Odliar was put to death by his Countess while her Lord was absent in Paris. Before the execution of the Seer he uttered the following remarkable prediction regarding the ultimate extinction of the MacKenzies of Seaforth, “I see into the far future, and I read the doom of the race of my oppressor. The long-descended line of Seaforth will, ere many generations have passed, end in extinction and in sorrow. I see a chief, the last of his house, both deaf and dumb. He will be the father of four fair sons, all of whom he will follow to the tomb. He will live careworn and die mourning, knowing that the honours of his line are to be extinguished for ever, and that no future chief of the MacKenzies shall bear rule at Brahan or in Kintail. After lamenting over the last and most promising of his sons, he himself shall sink into the grave, and the remnant of his possessions shall be inherited by a white-coifed lassie from the East, and she is to kill her sister. And as a sign by which it may be known that these things are coming to pass, there shall be four great lairds in the days of the last deaf and dumb Seaforth (Gairloch, Chisholm, Grant, and Raasay), of whom one shall be buck-toothed, another hare-lipped, another half-witted, and the fourth a stammerer. Chiefs distinguished by these personal marks shall be the allies and neighbours of the last Seaforth ; and when he looks around him and sees them, he may know that his sons are doomed to death, that his broad lands shall pass away to the stranger, and that his race shall come to an end.” Surely enough the Seer’s prediction was fulfilled in the time of Francis Humberston MacKenzie, the last Earl of Seaforth, who died in 1815. The Earl was born in full possession of all his faculties, but became stone-deaf, as a consequence of a severe attack of scarlet fever, when he was a boy at school. In the Earl’s time lived four Highland lairds who corresponded to the description given by the Brahan Seer., MacKenzie of Gairloch, Chisholm of Chisholm, Grant of Grant, and MacLeod of Raasay, who were distinguished by the peculiarities described by Coinneach Odhar. Owing to losses resulting from his West India estates, Lord Seaforth was compelled to part with much ancestral property, including that of Kintail, the cradle of the Seaforth race. Seaforth’s four sons all predeceased him, and, following on the calamity of the death of his last son, the chief became dumb. And now comes the extraordinary fulfilment of the last part of the Seer’s prophecy, “That a white-coifed lassie from the East is to kill her sister.” On the death of the last Earl of Seaforth without male issue, his properties were inherited by his elder daughter, the widow of Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, Bart. Sir Samuel died in the East Indies about the time of Lord Seaforth’s decease, and his widow, (“the white-coifed lassie”), returned to Scotland to take possession of the property which she had just inherited. After remaining a widow for some years the Honourable Lady Hood married again, her second husband being Mr Stewart, a grandson of the sixth Earl of Galloway, who assumed the name of MacKenzie in addition to his own. Some years after, Mrs Stewart-MacKenzie of Seaforth was one day driving her younger sister, the Honournable Caroline MacKenzie, in a pony carriage in the vicinity of Brahan Castle. The ponies suddenly took fright and bolted. Both the ladies were thrown out of the carriage. Mrs Stewart-MacKenzie escaped with a few bruises, but her sister sustained severe injuries, which proved fatal. In this surprising and tragic manner was the last portion of the Brahan Seer’s prediction of the doom of Seaforth fulfilled.