The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

34 THE HIGHLANDERS [part i
Muredach and Eoganan, there existed in Dalriada two independent
lines of princes, and that these two lines were once
more united in the person of Eoganan, after he had reigned
seventeen years in one part of the Dalriadic territories.
Two of the kings contained in the Latin Lists during this
are to be found in the Irish Annals in 778 they mention
period :
the death of Edfin Mac Eachach, Ri Dalriadcx, and in 781 the
death of Fergus Mac Eachach, Ri Dalriada. From this it
would appear that the kings of the Latin Lists were the kings
of Dalriada, properly speaking, and not those of the Albanic
Duan, and also that they were descended from Eachach, who
reigned over Dalriada in 726, and who was a Scot, of the tribe
of Gabran. The question then comes to be, who
princes in wcrc the kiugs said bv^ the Albanic Duan to be
Dalriada.
reigning in Dalriada during this period ? Aodh, the
first of them, could not, from the period of his reign, have been
the
the same person with Edfin, as is generally supposed ; and
fact that Aodh commenced his reign in the very year that the
Pictish monarch, as we have seen, overran Dalriada, and con-
quered the whole district of Lorn, affords a strong presumption
that he must have been put there by the Pictish king, and that
he ruled over the Pictish possessions in Dalriada. This pre-
the Annals of
sumption is placed almost beyond a doubt, by
Ulster, where we find, in 749,
" The burning of Cillemoire of
Aidan, the son of Angus." Aodh could not have been of the
line of Lorn, for the first of the proper kings of Dalriada during
this period, as given by the Latin Lists, is Ewen, the son of
Muredach, of that line. He could not have been of the line of
Fergus, for Ewen is succeeded, in the thirteenth year of Aodh's
reign, by Edfin of Fergus line ; and
when during the reign of
Aodh w^e find Cillemoire, a place in Lorn, actually in possession
of a person of the same name, and when that person is described
as the son of Angus, shortly after the district of Lorn had been
conquered by Angus, king of the Picts, we must hold it to
establish beyond a doubt, that Aodh, or Aidan, was the son of
Angus Mac Fergus, king of the Picts, and that he was the first
of a line of Pictish princes who ruled over the Pictish possessions
in Dalriada.
The two lines of kings reigning at the same time in Dalriada