or two usurpers - a common event in those turbulent times - Ferquhard
was undoubtedly a near relative and the legitimate successor
of the Celtic "Gillandres" earl of 1160. He is described in the
'Chronicle of Melrose' as "Comes Rossensis Machentagard," and in
Dalrymple's Annals of Scotland as "Mc Kentagar," a designation
which the author describes in a footnote as "an unintelligible
word," though its meaning is perfectly plain to every Gaelic-speaking
Celt.

Ferquhard founded the Abbey of Fearn, in Easter Ross, about 1230,
and died there in 1251.

Referring to his position during the first half of the thirteenth
century even the Earl of Cromartie is forced to admit in his MS., a
copy of which we possess, that "it cannot be disputed that the Earl
of Ross was the Lord paramount under Alexander II., by whom Farquhard
Mac an t'Sagairt was recognised in the hereditary dignity of his
predecessors, and who, by another tradition, was a real progenitor of
the noble family of Kintail." And this was said and written by an
author, who, in another part of the same manuscript, stoutly maintains
that the king granted these identical lands to Colin Fitzgerald by a
charter which, if it was ever signed at all, must have been signed a
full generation before the date which the forged document bears -
thirty years after the witnesses whose names attest it had gone to
their last home.


THE O'BEOLAN EARLS OF ROSS.