Qualla: Lochaber

Lochaber: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit XrysD, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1900, a Canadian Gaelic poet named Alasdair a' Ridse MacDhomhnaill, the son of a Lochaber man who had emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1816, wrote a single bitter line: 'They say the best singers and Seanachies left Scotland. They left Lochaber for certain.' By then, three things had emptied Lochaber: the Jacobite reprisals after Culloden, the Clearances of the early 19th century, and the Highland Potato Famine of the 1840s. Many of the Gaels who left Lochaber for Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, or Australia preserved the local dialect of Scottish Gaelic better than their relatives at home. A visitor to Canada in 1879 declared that the Lochaber dialect was spoken with more perfect accent and less English admixture in Glengarry County, Ontario than in Lochaber itself.

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Image: XrysD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lochaber: Loch of Swamps

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Ferguson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Lochaber has two possible origins. The scholar William Watson favoured a Pictish or Welsh root, abar meaning river mouth, so Loch Abar would mean the confluence where the Lochy and Nevis rivers flow into Loch Linnhe. He conceded a second possibility: that abar comes from...

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Image: John Ferguson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lochaber: Picts, Vikings, MacDonalds

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lochaber appears first in Adomnan's seventh-century Life of Columba. Ardnamurchan Point is believed to have marked the boundary between Pictish lands to the north and the Irish-descended Dal Riatans to the south. Inverlochy Castle, the seat of the medieval lordship of Lochaber, w...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lochaber: Cattle Raiders and Outlawed Priests

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Stümke, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the late 17th century, most of the Scottish Highlands were under tighter control: clan chiefs could be fined for crimes their followers committed. Lochaber was the great exception, identified by government officials, by other chiefs, and by Gaelic poets as a refuge for cattle ...

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Image: Paul Stümke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lochaber: Bliadhna nan Creach

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Bond, CC BY-SA 2.0. After Culloden in April 1746, government troops moved through Lochaber on punitive raids, burning farms, driving cattle, and killing those they found. The Gaels still call that summer Bliadhna nan Creach, the Year of the Pillaging. What followed was worse: the Clearances of the e...

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Image: Peter Bond | CC BY-SA 2.0