The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche)Mackenzie, Alexander
History
The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche)
Mackenzie, Alexander
Precognition; Prophecies
Stewart Mackenzie sold the great Island of Lewis to Sir James
Matheson.
After many years of happiness and prosperity, a frightful accident threw
the family into mourning. Mrs. Stewart Mackenzie was one day driving her
younger sister, the Hon. Caroline Mackenzie, in a pony carriage, among
the woods in the vicinity of Brahan Castle. Suddenly, the ponies took
fright, and started off at a furious pace. Mrs. Stewart Mackenzie was
quite unable to check them, and both she and her sister were thrown out
of the carriage much bruised and hurt. She happily soon recovered from
the accident, but the injury which her sister sustained proved fatal,
and, after lingering for some time in a hopeless state, she died, to the
inexpressible grief of all the members of her family. As Mrs. Stewart
Mackenzie was driving the carriage at the time of the accident, she may
be said to have been the innocent cause of her sister’s death, and thus
to have fulfilled the last portion of Coinneach’s prophecy which has yet
been accomplished.
Thus we have seen that the last chief of Seaforth was deaf and dumb;
that he had four sons; that he survived them all; that the four great
Highland lairds who were his contemporaries were all distinguished by
the peculiar personal marks the seer predicted; that his estates were
inherited by a white-coifed or white-hooded lassie from the East; that
his great possessions passed into the hands of other races; and that his
eldest daughter and heiress was so unfortunate as to be the innocent
cause of her sister’s death. In this vary remarkable instance of family
fate, the prophecy was not found out after the events occurred; it had
been current for generations in the Highlands, and its tardy fulfilment
was marked curiously and anxiously by an entire clan and a whole county.
Seaforth was respected and beloved far and near, and strangers, as well
as friends and clansmen, mourned along with him the sorrows of his later
years. The gradual development of the doom was watched with sympathy and
grief, and the fate of Seaforth has been, during the last half-century
of his life, regarded as one of the most curious instances of that
second-sight for which the inhabitants of the Highlands of Scotland have
been so long celebrated. Mr. Stewart Mackenzie, the accomplished husband
of the heiress of Seaforth, after being for many years a distinguished
member of the House of Commons and a Privy Councillor, held several high
appointments in the Colonial Dominions of the British Crown. He was
successively Governor of Ceylon and Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian
Islands, and died, universally beloved and lamented, in the year 1843.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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