The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan
A yellow silk banner kept at Dunvegan Castle on Skye, said to grant the clan victory three times when unfurled.
Draft entry · awaiting review
The Bratach Sìth — the Fairy Flag — is a fragment of yellow silk, perhaps two feet square, kept at Dunvegan Castle on Skye. The traditions agree on the broad shape: it was a parting gift from a fairy bride to a MacLeod chief, conveying victory in battle to the clan when unfurled in extremity. It would work three times. After the third, it would return to where it came from.
Two of those unfurlings are remembered. At Glendale around 1490 the MacDonalds had the MacLeods badly outnumbered; the flag was raised and the day reversed. At Trumpan in 1578, after a MacDonald raid burnt the church there with worshippers inside, the flag came out a second time. One unfurling, by the tradition, remains.
The mundane history is no less strange. Modern textile dating places the silk somewhere between the 4th and 7th centuries, and the weave suggests Syrian or Rhodian origin — older than any MacLeod, possibly a relic of the Crusades brought home centuries before the clan that now keeps it existed under that name. RAF pilots from the Skye area carried photographs of the flag in their tunics during the Second World War; the chief of the day offered to fly the original over the white cliffs of Dover if invasion came.