There’s a nice symmetry between the McCarrolls and Lamonts. The McCarrolls are Irish Protestants who trace their roots back to Scotland and Robert the Bruce. The Lamonts, on the other hand, are a Scottish Clan with roots in Ireland, specifically in the Irish kingdom of Dal Riatae, which were told migrated from Ulster to southwestern Scotland around the year 500.
The Lamonts lay claim to Norse origins too. The word Lamont derives from Lagman (Lawspeaker) which is from the Old Norse Logmaðr.
According to Wikipedia the Lamont clan controlled most of the remote and rugged Cowal Peninsula in South Western Scotland, although they did so in contention with Clan Campbell, with whom they had a rocky relationship.
When I say Cowal was “remote” I mean it. Even today its population is in the low 20,000s, mainly rural and hard to access, so it’s unlikely that they were bothered by anyone but the near neighbours until recent centuries. Personally the Lamont clan motto alone would have given me pause — Ne parcas nec spernas, which translates as “Neither spare nor spurn” or perhaps “Neither despise nor fear”. So would their decades — centuries — of battle experience scrapping with the Campbells and their allies, despite intermarriage and other interaction.
Wikipedia has some good stories. A strangely uplifting one from the 1600s describes a MacGregor chief who takes in a Lamont lad fleeing for his life. Having vowed to shelter him he discovers that the reason the boy is fleeing is that, on a hunting trip with a young MacGregor, a fight has broken out and the MacGregor boy killed. The dead boy is in fact the chieftain’s own son. But having given his word to protect him, the MacGregor chieftain escorts the young Lamont to safety and tells him to take care — if he comes across him on Lamont lands he’ll avenge his son. Years later that same chieftain turns up at a Lamont stronghold, Castle Toward, destitute and himself seeking shelter, having been stripped of everything by the Campbells. The Lamonts take him in and shelter him for the rest of his days.
Dorothy‘s document describes the nadir of the Campbell-Lamont feud:
The greatest blow to the Lamonts was dealt in I646. The civil wars of that period gave great opportunity for private feuds, and Ardkinglas, Dunstaffnage and other Campbell leaders, acting doubtless under their chief’s orders, ravaged the Lamont country and besieged and took the castles of Toward and Ascog. ‘They then carried their prisoners in boats to Dunoon, and massacred them to a number of about two hundred on the Gallowhill. Thirty-six gentlemen of the name of Lamont were hanged on a single ash tree.
That sounds like the Lamonts were done wrong, and they certainly were, but it was the final chapter in a longer story. The Lamonts had earlier attacked the “rebel” Campbells under charter from Charles I, and laid waste to large areas under Campbell control. The Lamonts or their allies were particularly brutal in North Cowal, especially Dunoon, which had been a Lamont stronghold until seized earlier by the Campbells. The Lamonts themselves had taken part part in a brutal slaughter at the Tower of Kilmun. The defenders had surrendered under promise that their lives would be spared, but the prisoners were instead “most cruelly” put to Death.
The largely Catholic Lamonts were vindicated after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 — and the leader of the Dunoon massacre beheaded in 1661 — but the clan never fully recovered, and its last lands were sold by the 21st Chief, who emigrated to Australia. Today the Lamonts are one of the widest scattered of the Scottish clans.