Currie

This Hebridean name is the corrupt English form of one of the most ancient and distinguished in Scotland’s history. Its Gaelic form is Mac Mhuirich, and bearers of it descend from the Irish family of Úi Dálaidh (O’Daly) whose descent can be traced historically from an 8^th-century King of Ireland. The O’Dalys were established in their literary role as a bardic family by the 12^th century. When Mael Íosa Ua Dálaidh died in 1185, he was described in the contemporary Irish annals as Ollamh (chief man of learning) of Ireland and Scotland.

                Of Mael Íosa’s great-grandsons, two are especially memorable. Donnchadh Mór was the most notable Gaelic religious poet of the Middle Ages, while his brother Muireadhach Albanach (Murach of Scotland) is the reputed progenitor of the Scottish Mac Mhuirichs. At least twenty poems are ascribed to Muireadhach Albanach, and it is significant that one of them is addressed to an Earl of the ancient Gaelic province of the Lennox, who died in 1217. Another of them can be seem from its contents to have been composed in the Adriatic, and provides supporting evidence that Muireadhach took part in the Fifth Crusade. By 1259 a Cathal Mac Mhuirich signs as witness to a document by virtue of his residence in the Lennox. His name is spelt Kathil Macmurchy, and he is almost certainly the son of Muireadhach Albanach.

                Such were the already ancient origins of Scotland’s longest learned dynasty. Naturally it attached itself to the Lords of the Isles when these maintained a virtually independent Gaelic principality in mediaeval Scotland. At the decisive battle of Harlaw in 1411, when the Lord of the Isles sought to enforce his claim to the lands of the Earldom of Ross against the parvenu dynasty of Stewart, it was Lachlann Mór Mac Mhuirich who composed the incitement to battle. Two related texts of this poem survive.

                Niall Mór is the first who appears under Clanranald patronage, and the earliest dateable poem from his pen belongs to the year 1613.

                The Clanranald bards produced the largest corpus of Mac Mhuirich writings. Niall Mac Mhuirich (c.1637-1726) chronicled the wars of Montrose in the last body of Gaelic prose to be written in Scotland in the ancient Irish script style. He was also the last fully competent poet of his family, and a hard core of ten of his poems survives, besides others that are attributed to him. He lived in Uist, a Catholic, and it was here that Lachlann Mac Mhuirich was found in 1800, who claimed to be 18^th in descent from Muireadhach Albanach. But the long persecution of his society and its religion and culture had at last reduced this dynasty to illiteracy: its great collection of manuscripts was dispersed, many of the cut up for tailors’ strips.

                It was in the 17^th century that the forms McVurich and McCurrie began to appear in historical records. By the end of the 18^th century the form Currie had become common in Islay; by the 19^th, the same form was in general use in Uist. Currie was the name that emigrants carried with them across the Atlantic: the name Lauchlan D. Currie used, who was Chief Justice of Nova Scotia and one of the Governors of St Francis Xavier University before his death in 1969.

Source: Scottish Clans & Tartans by Ian Grimble