The collection remained in the MacNicol family until 1871, when Ludovick Cameron, a son of Donald MacNicol's youngest daughter Alice and Ludovick Cameron, writer in Inverness, lent it to John Francis Campbell of Islay, for whose description of the collection see 'Leabhar na Feinne', pp. xv-xvi. Kept in a metal box, described by Campbell as a 'tin tea chest 10 x 7 x 7 inches', it was placed in the Advocates Library and into the care of the Gaelic scholar Donald Campbell Macpherson, a librarian there. Macpherson assisted Campbell with his research on the collection for his 'Leabhar na Feinne'.

Campbell, whose information came from Ludovick Cameron, mentions that some of the contents of the collection was believed to have 'passed through the hands of the authors of Lays of the Deer Forest' (Charles Edward and John Sobieski Stuart) around the year 1824. He further says: 'In 1836 Mr. Dugald Mac Nicol of the 1st Royals, a son of the collector, had the papers in the West Indies, and made some notes upon them. ... An elder brother of Dugald, who went to Calcutta and Australia, may have had some of his father's papers. But the tin tea chest seemed to contain a fair sample of the collection mentioned in Mac Nicol's published works.'

In 1874 a note by Ludovick Cameron states that the collection was still in the Advocates Library, and that he was happy to leave it in its safe-keeping for the time being. At some later stage the collection seems to have been returned to the family. It was deposited in the National Library of Scotland in 1951.