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Clan Leask

Clan LeaskClan Motto

Virtute cresco
I grow by virtue


Chief

Jonathan Leask of that Ilk
6 Nile Grove
Morningside
EDINBURGH
EH10 4RF

Clan LeaskThe History of the clan

As with many Scottish families, there are several possibilities as to the origin of the name. It may be a diminutive of the Anglo-Saxon 'lisse', meaning 'happy'. In Norse it means 'a stirring fellow'. The late Professor Keith Leask of Aberdeen believed that Liscus, chief of the Haedui, a tribe of Gauls described by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars, was the ancestor of the Leasks.

William de Laskereske appears on the Ragman Roll of 1296, submitting to Edward I of England. Around 1345 William Leask was granted a charter of confirmation by David II, son of Robert the Bruce, to his lands of Leskgoroune or Leskgaranne. He may be the same Willaim Leysk who was recorded in the parish records of the church at Ellon in Aberdeenshire as 'Willaim de Laysk, the elder, Lord of that Ilk'. The second known chief inherited half the lands of Henry de Brogan, Lord of Achlowne, in 1390. About the middle of the next century a younger son of Lask went to Orkney at the request of then earl, who had formed an almost princely court around his splendid palace at Kirkwall.

Clan LeaskA branch developed there which can still show the longest unbroken male lines of the family. Disaster overtook the family at the end of the seventeenth century when they borrowed heavily upon their estates to invest in the ill-fated Darien scheme, a trading venture in Central America. Alexander Leask of that Ilk, the thirteenth and last known chief in the unbroken line, gave up his estates, and the house of Leask became the residence of Robert Cumming.

Little is then known of the family until the twentieth century when, in 1963, a descendant managed to buy back a portion of the family lands and established a Leask Society with the support of other prominent Leasks. In 1968 the Lord Lyon recognised the present chief and re-established a line of descent which has secured the bloodline for at least the next two generations.