The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

64 THE HIGHLANDERS [part i
Now, when we consider the rugged and ahnost inaccessible nature
of the northern Highlands, the few circumstances which occurred
during the first eight centuries to make any great alteration in
the state of its tribes, and the unlikelihood that any political
change or event which might take place in a different part of the
country, could exercise any great influence over the inhabitants
of districts so remote ; there is ever\^ reason to conclude that the
northern tribes would in all probability vary but little in their
situation, extent, numbers, or power, from the period of the
and accordingly when we
Roman invasion to the tenth century ;
compare the number and situation of the tribes into which the
Highlands were divided in the tenth and eleventh centuries, with
the minute and accurate account of the Caledonian tribes, given
by Ptolemy in the second century, we find that in three particulars
only is there the slightest variation between them, and that
with these exceptions, the north of Scotland in the eleventh
century exhibits the exact counterpart, in the number and extent
of its tribes, to the same districts in the second.
The first variation which w-e observe is in the situation of the
two tribes of the Caledonii and the Vacomagi. In Ptolemy's
time the Caledonii certainly inhabited the west of Atholl, the
district of Badenoch, and the numerous glens which branch out
on every side from Lochness, while the Vacomagi possessed a
tract of country extending along their eastern frontiers, and
embracing the present counties of Nairn and Elgin, the districts
of Strathspey, Strathearn, and Marr, and the eastern part of
Atholl.
In the eleventh century we find these tribes in a different
situation ; for the territories occupied by these two tribes now-
formed the earldoms of Atholl, Moray, and Marr, the ridge of
the Mounth or Mound (including Drumnachdar), dividing the
former earldom from the two latter.
This is a change which could only have been produced by the
sudden seizure of the districts which afterwards formed the
earldom of Moray by another tribe, by which these two tribes
would be respectively confined to Atholl and Marr ; and as the
territories of the Taixali still remained unaltered as the earldom
of Buchan, probability points to the Cantese, who lay immedi-
ately to the north of the districts in question, as the invading