of Uist). Irish families of MacAulays with no connection with Clan MacAulay are the McAuleys of Co Offaly and Co Westmeath, the McAuleys in Ulster (Co Fermanagh), and the "MacAuleys of the Glens" (Co Antrim). The "MacAuleys of the Glens", however, have been thought to have been originally Scottish. Origins Clan MacAulay, or the family of the MacAulays of Ardincaple, is first recorded within the lands of Dunbartonshire, which was controlled in the Middle Ages by the mormaers (earls) of Lennox. Within the kindred of the mormaers, forms of the Gaelic given name Amhlaíbh were used by family members; and today the patronymic form of this name can be Anglicised as MacAulay. One such Amhlaíbh was a younger son of Ailín II, Earl of Lennox. This Amhlaíbh was the subject of a lay attributed to the poet Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh in which Muireadhach's Lennox property was named Ard nan Each. The Gaelic àrd means "high"; and each means "horse". Amhlaíbh and his descendants were the lords of Faslane and an extensive tract of land along the Gare Loch. The seat of Clan MacAulay was located at Ardincaple, which is situated on the shores of the Gare Loch in what is now the village of Rhu and town of Helensburgh. The place-name Ardincaple has been stated to be derived the Gaelic form of "cape of the horses" and "height of the horses". According to William Charles Maughan writing at the end of the 19th century, the Ardincaple estate had two main residences, one at Ardincaple, the other to the north at Faslane. Maughan stated that the site of the castle of Faslane could be distinguished, at the time of his writing, "by a small mound near the murmuring burn which flows into the bay". Geoffrey Stell's census of mottes in Scotland lists only four in Dunbartonshire; one of which is Faslane (), another listed as a "possible" is at Shandon (); Shandon being located between site of Faslane and the town of Helensburgh. Maughan wrote that at Faslane there stood an oak tree at place called in Scottish Gaelic Cnoch-na-Cullah (English: "knoll of the cock"). According to legend, when a cock crowed beneath the branches of the old oak upon the knoll, a member of Clan MacAulay was about to die. The actual ancestry of Clan MacAulay is uncertain. The recorded chiefs of the clan were the lairds of Ardincaple