Mackintosh Mackay

The Very Rev Mackintosh MacKay LLD (1793-1873) was a Scottish minister and author who served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland in 1849. He edited the Highland Society's prodigious Gaelic dictionary ('Dictionarium Scoto-Celticum) in 1828.

He was born on 18 November 1793 at Duardbeg on Edrachillis Bay in Sutherland, one of seven children to Cpt Alexander Mackay and his wife Helen. He studied at St Andrews University then at Divinity Hall in Edinburgh. He was ordained by the Church of Scotland at Laggan in 1825 and translated to the far larger parish of Dunoon in 1832.

He was one of the many ministers who split from the established Church of Scotland in the Disruption of 1843.In 1849, he succeeded the Very Rev Patrick Clason of Buccleuch Church as Moderator of the General Assembly. The Assembly was held at Tanfield Hall in Canonmills. He was succeeded in turn by Very Rev Nathaniel Paterson in 1850.

In the early 1850s he travelled to Australia to spread the views of the Free Church. From 1854 he was minister of the Gaelic Free Church in Melbourne. He became minister of St George's Church in Sydney in May 1856, being responsible for its first permanent purpose-built church in 1860. Returning to Scotland in the 1860s, he spent his final years preaching in Tarbert on the Isle of Harris.

He died at 3 Bellfield in Portobello, Edinburgh on 17 May 1873. He is buried in Duddingston Kirkyard in south Edinburgh. The grave lies against the western boundary wall.

A second memorial stands in the Grange Cemetery in south Edinburgh, east of the eastern path, next to the large obelisk to Christian Isobel Johnstone.

(as editor) *Dictionarium Scoto-Celticum: A Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1828) (the first Gaelic dictionary to contain 'Vocabularies of Latin and English Words')

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