The Brahan Seer

Coinneach Odhar, or Kenneth MacKenzie, got his affliction from an action of his mother. On her way back from helping at a birth, the young Coinneach's mother passed by a graveyard on a certain night when the ghosts rose from their graves to wander the earth. A brave woman, and an inquisitive one, she waited by the grave of a young girl for the ghost to return. When the spectre of the girl appeared, Coinneach's mother barred the way into the grave.

The girl's ghost was frightened at this because it was near dawn and she had to return to her rest or suffer terrible consequences. Coinneach's mother asked the girl where she had been and why she went there. The ghost replied that she had gone to Denmark where she had once been a princess. She had fallen into the sea at Denmark and her corpse had been washed ashore in Scotland where she had been buried as an unknown.

Seeing that she had a princess in her power, Coinneach's mother demanded a tribute for allowing free passage to the grave. The princess offered the gift of Second Sight. "Give it to my son," was the careful reply.

And so it was that Coinneach Odhar became the Seer of Brahan in 1625. Later that same day, about noon, Coinneach stopped working in the field and lay down for a rest after eating his bread and cheese. He was awakened from his sleep by a small stone which dug into his side. It was a curious stone, bluish-black with a hole through it and about the size of a man's knuckle.

Casually, Coinneach looked through the hole in the stone - and gazed upon the future. What he saw, he told others about. In fact, he made so many prophecies that usually only the ones dealing with the distant future were written down.

He talked of great black, bridleless horses, belching fire and steam, drawing lines of carriages through the glens. More than two hundred years later, railways were built through the Highlands and the name of the Brahan Seer was spoken in awe. Streams of fire and water, he said, would run beneath the streets of Inverness and into every house. Gas and water pipes were laid down in the 19th century.

With sadness, Coinneach spoke of the day when Culloden would run with blood, when the best of the Highlanders would die for their king. "The moor, before many generations have passed, shall be stained with the best blood in Scotland. I will not live to see it and I am glad for that."

He talked of the great calamity that would follow and how power would pass to women. The Highland men, he proclaimed with disgust, would become so effeminate that they would run from sheep. "The sheep shall eat the men," was his sorry prediction and Scotland would do this to itself.

After the Jacobite army was defeated at Culloden in 1746 by forces of the Crown, themselves mostly Scots, the way was opened for the Highland Clearances. Highland landowners sold some of their own men into slavery in the Americas and most of the rest were driven out to be replaced by sheep. Sheep farming was to be the future of the Highlands but it profited only the Lairds and the men left without putting up much of a fight, their women wanting only peace.

As his fame spread, Coinneach Odhar's predictions became more and more bizarre. He spoke of huge ships sailing through the Great Glen, all the way across Scotland. The Caledonian Canal was the fulfilment of his vision centuries later.

He predicted that Tomnahurich, the fairy hill of Inverness, would be barred and locked: "One day the Fairy Hill will be under lock and key and the fairies will be secured within." In 1860 the place was turned into a cemetery and, in Victorian fashion, it was surrounded by iron railings and a gate which was locked at night.

"A village with four churches will get another spire," said Coinneach, "and a ship will come from the sky and moor at it." This unlikely event happened in 1932 when an airship made an emergency landing and was tied up to the spire of the new church.

North Sea oil was foretold: "A black rain will bring riches to Aberdeen." Coinneach Odhar spoke of the day when Scotland would once again have it's own Parliament. This would only come, he said, when men could walk dry shod from England to France. The opening of the channel tunnel which allowed just such a walk was followed a few years later by the opening of the first Scottish Parliament since 1707.

The feminism of the late 20th century was also mentioned: "Women without shame shall dress as men and wander all over Scotland and not a clergyman of grace will be found to speak against them." Feminism won't last, we're told: "Women will at last be angry at their evil sisters who sit and walk like men and shun them and look again for husbands."

Men won't be in too much of a hurry to return to a pre-feminist lifestyle: "Women will look in vain for husbands but men will hold to free living." The outlook for post-feminist women is bleak: "Women will never again be held in high regard and Chivalry will be dead at the hands of shorn-haired hags. Wives will fret to keep their husbands and sorrow for their daughters. Men will laugh and be happy."

It was a woman who was the end of Coinneach Odhar. Isabella, wife of the Earl of Seaforth and said to be one of the ugliest women in Scotland, asked for his advice. Described as being "without art, nor part nor portion", this lady was justifiably suspicious of her husband's late return from a visit to Paris.

Coinneach re-assured her that the Earl was in good health but he was unusually reluctant to go into further detail. Knowing the worst but determined to hear it from another, Isabella threatened to have him killed if he didn't tell all he knew.

Never having had much time for the nobility, often comparing their children unfavourably with dogs, Coinneach let her have it with both barrels. "Your husband," he said, "is this moment with another who is fairer than yourself. She could hardly be other."

On hearing this, Isabella had the guards seize Coinneach. Screaming that he had insulted both her husband and herself by his lies, she had the Seer taken to the courtyard where a barrel of tar was boiling. Throwing his stone outside, where it landed in the water-filled hoof-print of a cow, Coinneach Odhar made his last prediction:

"I see the doom of the family of my oppressor. The line of Seaforth will come to an end in sorrow. I see the last head 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 forever, that no future chief of the Mackenzies shall bear rule at Brahan or in Kintail.

"His inheritor will be a white-coifed lass who will kill her sister. As a sign that these things are coming to pass, there shall be four great lairds in the days of the last Seaforth, the deaf and dumb chief. One shall be buck-toothed, another hare-lipped, another half-witted, and the fourth a stammerer. Chiefs like these shall be the neighbours of the last of the Seaforths; and when he sees them, he may know that his sons are doomed to death, that his lands shall pass away to the stranger, and that his race shall come to an end."

Coinneach Odhar was then thrust headfirst into the boiling tar. His prediction was fulfilled when Francis Humberston Mackenzie, deaf and dumb from scarlet fever as a child, inherited the title in 1783. The white-coifed lass was his eldest daughter, widow of Admiral Sir Samuel Hood whose arms bore a white hood or coif. She later lost control of a pony and trap which killed her sister.

Looking for the stone which the Brahan Seer threw into the mark of a cow, his murderers found water coming from the spot. Some say the water became Loch Ussie, others that it merely washed the stone into it.

Many of Coinneach Odhar's predictions have still to come about. The overturning of a great stone near Inverness is said to presage the end of the world. "When the stone is turned for the third time, the end of all will follow in a week." The stone was turned over by a blacksmith, as a demonstration of his strength, in 1789. It was turned again by another strongman in 1932. The stone is now surrounded by an iron cage set in concrete.

You can't be too careful with these things...

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