Duncan MacIver Campbell - The Troubled Laird

This is the fascinating story of an intriguing man, born in interesting times. Duncan Paterson was born in Kilrush, County Clare, Ireland around 1798 to an Irish mother and a Scottish father of some pedigree. Born a Paterson, he would, in 1853, successfully apply to the Lord Lyon in Edinburgh to change his name to Duncan MacIver Campbell upon his inheritance of the substantial Asknish estate at Lochgair, Argyll.

Duncan had an eventful personal life, marrying twice without issue, however, between those marriages he would conduct a relationship of some years standing with one of his domestic servants, resulting in the birth of three illegitimate children, two daughters and a son. The first marriage, lasting less than a year, was not for love, but for Duncan's financial benefit, and almost inevitably, ended in a long running and bitter divorce case, debated not only in the Scottish Courts, but considered on appeal, at length, in the House of Lords. His second wife was related to both him, and his first wife, however, against all the odds, this marriage was successful and would last twenty years until his death in 1881.

He had a number of acrimonious disputes which would cause him great anxiety and bouts of depression throughout a substantial part of his life. Disputes with his father leading to his exile from Kilrush, with his first wife, with her father and family, with a rival claimant to his accession to the chieftainship of the MacIver Campbell family, with the Admiralty over a disputed patent, and, with a number of local fishermen leading to a physical assault on him.

His long life was divided almost equally between the west coast of Ireland in the small, but expanding town of Kilrush, County Clare and on the west coast of Scotland at Lochgair, not far from Inveraray in the county of Argyll. In Ireland he worked in the family business his Scottish father, James Paterson, had created from scratch after settling in Kilrush following his discharge from the Royal Navy. James Paterson had an eye for a business opportunity and began exporting oats and farm produce at a time Great Britain needed all the produce it could get as so many of its men were serving in both the army and navy, this being the era of conflict with France and the threat of invasion by Napoleon.

This is the first ever biography of Duncan MacIver Campbell head of the MacIver Campbell family of Asknish and the Laird of the Asknish Estate at Lochgair in Argyll between 1853 and 1881. Drawing on extensive archival research in Scotland and Ireland, Angus Campbell charts for the first time, MacIver Campbell's incredibly eventful life along with a detailed insight into his early years in Kilrush along with his Paterson and MacIver Campbell pedigree.

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