durnach

Updated: May 2, 2025

The same king between 1140 and 1145 issued a mandate "to Reinwald Earl of Orkney and to the Earl and all the men of substance of Caithness and Orkney to love and maintain free from injury the monks of Durnach and their men and property," and also in some year between 1145 and 1153, he granted Hoctor Common near Durnach, to Andrew, Bishop of Caithness, whose see was then well established there, and he spent the summer of 1150, while he was superintending the building of the Cistercian abbey of Kinloss, in the neighbouring Castle of Duffus, whose ruins still stand, with Freskyn de Moravia, the first known ancestor of the Earls of Sutherland.

James Gray - Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time: or, The Jarls and The Freskyns