The Seer’s final prophecy is his most famed. Renowned across the Scottish Highlands, he was summoned by Lady Seaforth, the countess at Brahan Castle, for news of her husband, Kenneth Mackenzie (no immediate relation of our author Alexander), who had gone on a visit to Paris. A prominent version of the story has the prophet reveal seeing Mackenzie “in a gay-gilded room, grandly decked out in velvets, with silks and cloth of gold, and on his knees before a fair lady, his arm round her waist, and her hand pressed to his lips.” Humiliated and incensed, the countess condemns the Brahan Seer to be burned in a barrel of tar. In response, his final vision foretells the end of the Seaforth male line. The last of the Seaforth Mackenzies is to be deaf and dumb, and all four of his sons will pass before him. His remaining possessions are to be inherited by a white-hooded “lassie from the East”, who will kill her sister. The doomed Lord will know his time has come by the presence of four other Highland noblemen — one “buck-toothed, another hare-lipped, another half-witted, and the fourth a stammerer.”
