guest house pitlochry
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It was the increasing appropriation of tithes that helped finance the building of many splendid ecclesiastical monuments in Scotland. But as many historians have pointed out, it also led to the poverty of local parishes and their priests. The consequent discontent was one of the major causes of the later Reformation that completely transformed the Scottish Church with astonishing speed. Thus the greed of the ecclesiastical establishment, aided and abetted by the large landowners, (often in high Church positions) led to that sweeping reform that so affected the subsequent history of Scotland (and that of Ulster).
Any modern visitor to the Highlands becomes rapidly aware, not only of the harshness of life that such mountainous and barren terrain imposed on its scattered inhabitants, but also of how difficult it must have been to communicate between the various glens. It was this difficulty, however, that helped perpetuate the clan system. From time immemorial, the Highlanders had been organized in the ancient system of tribes or clans (the word clan meaning children). Family would perhaps be a better translation, for a clan was a close-knit, extended family, intensely loyal to its patriarch and fiercely proud of its own customs and traditions. The central feature of the clan (as opposed to the tribe, which had a territorial basis), was the deeply rooted Celtic principle of kinship, consanguinity -- all the members were bonded together by blood relationship. In particular, the clan chief and the heads of its various branches, the septs, were closely related; they bore a common name.
It is in Ireland that most of the highland clans originated. In the late fifth century, Loarn, son of Erc, was one of the three brothers who established the kingdom of Dalriada in Argyllshire and it is to him that most of the modern clan genealogies are traced. A direct line of ancestry went back from the MacDonalds, the Lords of the isles, to the Irish Colla Uais. It must be a source of much delight to this proud clan that their old archenemy the Campbells seem to have a purely fictitious origin. Viking invasions in the eighth and ninth centuries resulted in strong Norse origins for clans such as the MacLeods and Nicholsons. In the time of the Druids, when the clan system was becoming firmly established, every heir or young chieftain had to give a public exhibition of his courage before being accepted. He was then placed on a pyramid of stone encircled by his clan, who then vowed to follow and obey him. The chief Druid then eulogized the ancestry and noble deeds of the family. Before a battle, in a speech known as Brosnachaidh Catha "Incentive to Battle," the chief Druid would also pour scorn on the enemy and praise the fighting men of his clan. This was a tradition found in other parts of the Celtic world as attested to by historian Tacitus, who described the fear of the Roman army on the shores of the Menaii faced by an awesome panoply of druids.
Throughout the centuries, conditions in the Highlands and Western Isles were ideal for the perpetuation of clan life and the traditions associated with it.