About

This is an unofficial fan website devoted to the history of the Lords of Kinfauns — a lordship rooted in the barony of Kinfauns and Kinfauns Castle in Scotland, and later carried into Ireland through the family of Newhall House and the historic Killone Abbey in County Clare. Together these tell a story that runs from medieval Scotland to present-day County Clare. It is simply a record compiled out of an interest in the title's history.

Links

If you would like to learn more about Newhall, seat of the Lords of Kinfauns, several excellent books exist — including those of Florence Vere O'Brien, who lived at Newhall in the 1890s.

History

Lordship of Kinfauns

Records place confirmation of the lordship in 1487, under King James III, and again in 1608 under King James I of Ireland — confirmations of an earlier creation whose founding charters are now lost. Family tradition pushes the origin back further still, to roughly 1340, crediting a onetime sea pirate, Sir Thomas Charteris, who was pardoned and knighted — his story is recounted at length elsewhere on this site. The line of succession merged into the Earldom of Moray — one of the seven ancient earldoms of Scotland — before devolving, in time, upon the Commane family in accordance with the succession provisions of the original charter.

Associated with the lordship is the hereditary office of the Admiralty of the Tay, granted by the Crown upon the heirs and successors of the lordship of Kinfauns, and connected with the barony's historic position on the River Tay in Perthshire.

A Legacy Restored

Newhall House & Killone Abbey

Just outside Ennis in County Clare stands Newhall House, an estate with a documented pedigree reaching back to the Tudor period. Its recorded history opens in 1544, when Henry VIII made over Killone Abbey and the lands around it, Newhall among them, to Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Thomond, under the Crown's surrender-and-regrant arrangement. The house itself, with its stable block, began to take shape around 1650 under the Viscount Clare, and at its largest is said to have covered some 9,000 acres, functioning as a hub of local social and economic life.

A short distance from the house stand the ruins of Killone Abbey, an Augustinian foundation traditionally dated to 1190 under Donal Mór O'Brien, King of Munster, long regarded as a refuge for women of noble birth within Gaelic Ireland's monastic life. Suppressed along with the other religious houses, it survives today only in fragmentary Gothic stonework, while close by, the Holy Well of St John the Baptist — associated with pre-Christian offerings — still draws those who come to see it.

One of eleven children, Fergus Commane was raised on a farm belonging to his parents that looked directly onto the great house Newhall, on ground once counted as part of the estate itself. Following a path familiar to many of his Irish contemporaries, he left for London, where he built a business career and found success while still young. His attachment to the land never faded, and for years he held onto the ambition of one day acquiring Newhall and bringing it back to its earlier grandeur. Repeated attempts to secure the property came to nothing until, eventually, circumstances shifted and the estate came up for sale.

Under the Commane family's stewardship, Newhall has become a family home once more, and plans are underway for a wellness retreat on the grounds designed around the site's folklore, spiritual associations, and cultural weight. Alongside this, the family is putting resources into the upkeep of the Holy Well of St John and Killone Abbey — work aimed at giving these landmarks fresh purpose and restoring Newhall's standing as a living part of Irish heritage.

Gaelic nobility of Ireland

The Commane family's roots in this part of Clare are traced back more than a millennium. Genealogical sources and DNA analysis connect them by direct male descent to the ruling Déisi Muman kings — the early medieval Déisi people of Munster — and to the historic Chiefdom of Tulach Commáin, "the fort of The Commane" their chief, whose territory once took in areas of present-day Clare, placing them among the Gaelic nobility.

By tradition — and this is legend rather than settled record — the family line is traced to a 3rd-century figure called Ferchess mac Commán, described in the Irish annals as a fían fighter, a seer, a poet, and a lord of the Gaelic order, attached to the household of King Ailill, who governed the south of the country; later generations render the same name in English as Fergus Commane. Early Irish sagas tell how Ailill charged Ferchess with avenging the killing of his son Éogan by striking down Mac Con, then High King of Ireland.

Tradition also credits the family with kinship to an Irish saint, Commán, who founded monasteries at Roscommon and Kinvara in the 6th century — a further thread said to tie the Commanes to Newhall and the wider district across the centuries.