The Brahan Seer, prophet of the Highlands and the doom of the Seaforths
Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer: the holed stone, the legend of his death at Chanonry Point, the Seaforth prophecy and the nineteenth-century collection.
In the Scottish Highlands the name of Coinneach Odhar, Kenneth the Dun-coloured, is tied to one of the liveliest prophetic traditions of Gaelic culture. Known in English as the Brahan Seer, after Brahan Castle near Dingwall, seat of the Mackenzie earls of Seaforth, he is said to have possessed the “second sight”, the ability to perceive distant or future events that for centuries was attributed to certain inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands.
A figure hard to place
Oral tradition places the seer in the seventeenth century and has him born on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. The written sources, however, are late. Historians have pointed out that a Kenneth nicknamed Owir appears in a document of 1577 among people accused of witchcraft in the county of Ross, which has led to the suggestion that the seventeenth-century legend absorbed the memory of an earlier figure.
His date therefore remains uncertain, and many features of the story belong to patterns common in folklore. According to tradition, Coinneach received his visions by looking through a small stone with a hole in the middle, obtained in marvellous circumstances; the variants say that it was left to him by a supernatural being or that he found it after falling asleep on a fairy hill.
The sentence and the Seaforth prophecy
The most famous story concerns his death. The Earl of Seaforth was in Paris, and Countess Isabella asked the seer for news of her husband. After some hesitation Coinneach revealed that the earl was in the company of another woman. The countess, offended, had him condemned to burn for witchcraft, and tradition holds that he was burned in a tar barrel at Chanonry Point, on the Black Isle, where a stone now commemorates the legend.
Before dying he is said to have uttered the prophecy of the doom of the Seaforths: the last lord of the house would be deaf and dumb, would see his sons die, and the estate would pass to a woman come from the East. Francis Humberston Mackenzie, who died in 1815, became deaf as a boy, outlived his four sons, and the inheritance passed to his daughter, widowed in India of an admiral. How far the prophecy was really known before the events remains disputed.
Alexander Mackenzie's collection
Most of the prophecies attributed to the Brahan Seer were collected in 1877 by Alexander Mackenzie, a publisher in Inverness, in a volume that played a decisive part in fixing the corpus. It includes predictions about the battle of Culloden, about the canal that would cross the Great Glen, about ships that would sail behind the hill of Tomnahurich. How much of this material genuinely predates the events is impossible to establish with certainty.
The Brahan Seer belongs more to the history of oral tradition than to documentary history, and that is precisely what makes him valuable. His legend speaks of the relationship of Gaelic communities with the power of the great clans, the memory of the witchcraft persecutions and the belief in second sight, which as late as the eighteenth century travellers such as Samuel Johnson and James Boswell tried to investigate on their journey to the Hebrides.