Mackay Bursary
The Mackay Bursary was founded in 1808 by Duncan Mackay (1741-1808). He mortified the sum of £300 to support one bursar at United College. At Mackay’s behest, the following year the College used a portion of the funds to purchase the lease of the ‘Grange’ farm and re-let it to a third party. Rental yields, thereby, helped to maintain the fund. Mackay had nominated ‘his chief’, Eric Mackay, 7th Lord Reay (1773–1847) as patron of the bursary, and requested that preference be given to ‘any young man of merit from the district of Breadalbane’ (i.e. Mackay’s birthplace) or ‘from the Highlands of Perthshire’. By the 1890s, the then-Lord Reay had decided to ‘throw open the bursary to competitive examination among the natives of the Reay country… educated at local schools’. He organised an examination in Latin translation, arithmetic (‘up to square root’) and English writing and literature. The Mackay Bursary is now part of the merged Lapsed Bursaries fund.