Agnes Maxwell MacLeod

Agnes Maxwell MacLeod (1783–1879) also known as Mrs. Norman MacLeod was a Scottish poet. She is best known as the author of the ballad Sound the Pibroch.^[1]

Agnes Maxwell was born on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. In her early youth, she lived with an uncle and aunt in Drumdrissaig, on the western coast of Knapdale.

The Historian Philip Gaskell described the friendship of Agnes Maxwell with Catherine Maclachlan the eldest daughter of Argyll's tacksman at Rahoy in his book Morvern Transformed “Catherine being the eldest girl with many brothers between her and the next sister, was educated six months of the year at home by a governess, and the six other months at Aross, in Mull, with her friend Miss Maxwell (afterwards Mrs Norman Macleod), the governess being half her time at each house, as also the two girls."

Catherine Maclachlan (1786–1825) married John Sinclair of Lochaline in 1814, and sadly died in childbirth age 39.

Gaskell also records that: Agnes Maxwell, the daughter of Argyll's Chamberlain of Mull and Morvern James Maxwell of Aros, married in 1811 Norman MacLeod, later of St Columba's, eldest son of the 'old minister'.

On Page 248 Gaskell provides a Genealogical Table with the marriage of Norman MacLeod 1745-1824 to Jean Morison d. 1827 and that his son Norman (1783-1862) m. Agnes Maxwell.^[2]

When of age, Agnes went to an Edinburgh finishing school, then returned to Mull. She met Rev. Norman MacLeod, a Church of Scotland minister and married him four years later. She spent the next nearly-sixty years as a minister's wife in Campbeltown, Campsie, and at St Columba Church in Glasgow. She was the wife of a poet and the mother of poets, and a poet herself. She would go on to write and compile a poetry collection called Songs of the North, that would be edited by her granddaughter Annie Campbell MacLeod Wilson, Harold Boulton, and Malcolm Lawson, and which was dedicated to Queen Victoria.^[1] One of the songs it contains is Sound the Pibroch, which is about the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, and which has since been recorded by The Corries and many other Scottish folk music bands.