Out of the Mists, Scottish and Irish Ancestors Speak
With the end of Droughtlander, and the long-running Outlander series finally concluding with the broadcast of the second half of season seven now through January and season eight later in 2025, I’m reflecting on how the series, which started in 2014, inspired a new curiosity and appreciation for Scottish roots. It also inspired a wonderful adventure to Scotland with my siblings, and a desire to return before I pass this mortal coil.
My wife and I watched the first episode of the new eight-episode half-season Friday on the Starz streaming service. Seasons one through six are on Netflix.
In this episode, Jamie, Claire, and young Ian take a break from the war for American independence to return to Jamie’s homestead Lallybroch in Scotland to complete some “unfinished business.” Full plot summary. This first hour-long show since mid-2023 moved too quickly and tried to cram in too many plot twists. I think I would prefer to acclimate fully by watching two hour-long episodes in one evening. The next episode will be available for streaming next Friday.
I’m probably less than 25% Scotch-Irish, but my Scottish and Irish ancestors capture my imagination. I envision them rising up out of the mists in their Celtic léines and kilts, with their fiddles playing and bagpipes humming, speaking to me. What kind of people were they? What would they have to say or teach us today?
This vision is made more real by a visit to the Green Isles, where I learned the long history of Irish and Scottish underdogs who endured centuries of oppression and civil conflict.
I tell my sons, grandson, nieces, and nephews that if they want to know their great-grandfather Buie's family history, they should watch “Outlander.” Yes, it is glamorized, but the basic outline --from a tight-knit Scottish clan that immigrated to North Carolina in the 1700s during the destruction of the clan system, and were caught up a few decades later in the American Revolution— is similar to real life.
For much of their history, the Scots and the Irish were losers. Their clan systems were demolished, their kingdoms destroyed, their native language — Gaelic — was banned, and their very identities were subsumed by the English.
And yet, when you visit Ireland and Scotland, you don’t sense that they are losers at all, but winners because their strong sense of national identity persists to this day. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, or period of rapid economic growth, may have lost its roar, but after years of austerity, it may be coming back.
For Scotland’s part, it thinks it invented capitalism (Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was a Scot), and just about everything else, including the modern world itself.
Goodreads’ take on How the Scots Invented the Modern World and
How the Irish Saved Civilization.
Both Ireland and Scotland take great pride, credit, and ownership of their brethren who have made it in America. Did you know that Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were Irish? And that Donald Trump and Elvis Presley were or are Scots? Really? Or just blarney?
Celtic ancestors walked from probably Africa to India to Asia Minor (Turkey), migrated to Southern and Central Europe, mixed with French, sailed over to Scotland and Ireland, and became Celtic kings of Northern Ireland and Western Scotland, called Dal Riata. They endured Norse and Viking invasions, raped, pillaged, plundered, and mixed with Picts and the Danes.
My clan, the Buies, a sept of MacDonald, lived on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides west of Scotland from approximately 600 A.D. to the early 21st century. The last of the Buie surname left the island to move to Sweden, but there are still kinfolk there amongst the approximately 200 residents, I learned in a 2015 trip.
My direct ancestors left the island in the 1730s and moved to North Carolina, which some of us still inhabit. Including a huge contingent of Outlander fans, as exemplified by the Outlander North Carolina group and the often 9,000 Scottish descendants who show up for the annual Scottish County Highland Games in Laurinburg each October, and the tens of thousands more who have attended the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games which have taken place annually since 1956.
In Ancient Europe, the Gauls, AKA the Celts, Barbarians, Lost to the Romans. But Maybe They Were More Civilized?
When my parents forced me to take Latin in ninth grade, I didn’t realize I was learning the history of the winners of a cultural war between the Celts and the Romans, which of course the Romans won.
As a teenager looking for identity, perhaps I would have been more engaged and done better if I had been told that I was descended from the Gauls, aka the Celts, who were frequently referred to in the Roman literature we read in Latin, especially about the Gallic wars with the Romans.
Almost the only thing I remember from ninth-grade Latin is “puella est pulchra” (the girl is beautiful) and “Estne in provincia puella” (“is there a girl in the country?”), which may say more about my distracted hormones at that age than about my ability to learn Latin. Indeed, when the Romans referred to threats from barbarians, they were probably referring to my ancestors!
None of us are pure bred, of course, but I like to think of my ancestry as Celtic instead of Roman and Anglo-Saxon. The Celts, it seemed, were not particularly interested in dominating others, not interested in building empires, but were very soulful — musicians, poets, religious leaders, faeries, storytellers. The Celts of the British Isles — the Scottish, the Irish, the Welsh — had to defend themselves against encroaching empire — struggled to maintain their own identity — but have so far survived.
Where Did The Celts Come From?
Here are a series of short documentaries on the Celts that I found on YouTube. It’s currently a playlist of 30 videos. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg_ku4zDOu_qiwc5zxCPHYJ7j4kvdBSGD
They explain who the Celts were, at least in a positive sense, focusing on Celtic spirituality, how Celtic religion shaped Ireland and Scotland, Druids: Keepers of Celtic Wisdom, Differences between Irish and Celtic Mythology, the Celts of Anatolia (now Turkey), the Rise and Fall of Celtic Warriors, and includes this brief video.
Scottish Culture in North Carolina
Raised in Scotland County, North Carolina, with Scottish ancestry on my father’s side, I’ve had an interest in Scottish history and culture since I was a wee lad. “The woods are filled with kinfolk or God-blessed Macks,” my father used to say.
In general, immigrants to America hold onto their language and traditions for two generations, while the third generation is usually eager to assimilate if they do not face hostility and discriminatory barriers to do so.
Gatherings of the clans, storytelling, and yarn-spinning, singing ballads and hymns, reciting poetry, identifying “thin” places between the spiritual and physical worlds, hearing or seeing ghosts, delighting in the mysteries of life — these are ways we keep the traditions alive.
Wearing kilts, playing bagpipes, dancing a jig or a fling, organizing Scottish games, eating haggis, and hosting “Bobby Burns nights” may be re-creations of Scottish cultural traditions, not continuity or hand-me-downs from the ancestors, but they are certainly fun things to do.
Neither European, British nor American history courses lend Scottish history much significance. By their telling, most Scots lived hardscrabble lives, huddled in hovels penetrated frequently by an icy arctic wind, subsisted on gruesome diets of haggis, fish, or oatmeal, with an occasional lamb, and eked out sad lives as crofters or tenant farmers until unfeeling lairds hiked the rents and made even miserable lives of subsistence nigh impossible, forcing emigration to the new world for simple survival.
One highlight of my travels in Scotland was learning the history and culture. Another was touring Edinburgh, the Highlands, the Isles of Skye, and Jura in the Hebrides, where our paternal ancestors came from in the 1700s. My siblings felt like we were time-traveling hundreds of years, and reconnecting with a previously invisible part of our family history.
Movies
Rob Roy and
Braveheart, among others, depict Irish and Scottish heroes.
The NYT highlighted a dozen films set in Scotland. Google offers more than 50.
And yet, as with all history, there is a dark side. When I was a kid, talking openly about your “clan” in the rural South could easily be misinterpreted as “klan.”
Drill Deeper:
My clan, the Buies, a sept of MacDonald, lived on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides west of Scotland from approximately 600 A.D. to the early 21st century. The last of the Buie surname left the island to move to Sweden, but there are still kinfolk there amongst the approximately 200 residents, I learned in a 2015 trip.
My direct ancestors left the island in the 1730s and moved to North Carolina, which some of us still inhabit. Including a huge contingent of Outlander fans.
Alastair McIntyre of Electronic Scotland, a site for the “Scottish Diaspora,” has posted a history of the Scots and the Buie clan from time immemorial. “Alexander Lamont of Edinburgh, Scotland, a sailor and descendent of the Jura Buies, once stated that in travels all over the world, he never met a Buie who did not trace back origins to Islay or Jura.”
Eochaid or Eugene Buidhe, pronounced “Boo-eee” was a Celtic prince in 608 A.D. who led the Scots and successfully defended his kingdom at Jura from the Saxon invasion. He was the first person to use the name Buidhe, meaning blond-haired Scot. Most people did not have surnames until the last half of the 11th century when Scottish King Malcolm III introduced the idea. Many adopted the name of an ancestor and simply added the Gaelic “mac” which meant “son of.”
Isle of Jura history (Wikipedia).
the Scottish Heritage Center at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, NC.
(This is part one of a series of Substack articles.)