Duncan Tartan

Clan Duncan

Duncan comes from the Gaelic forename Donnchadh, and that is both the appeal and the difficulty of the name: it was common, so Duncans in different parts of Scotland need not be related to one another. Descent from the Celtic Earls of Atholl, and ultimately from Donnchadh Reamhar who led Clan Donnachaidh under Robert I, is genealogical tradition rather than charter evidence — and that line is in any case the ancestry of the Robertsons. Duncan is far better documented as a name associated with Clan Donnachaidh than as an independent clan; Wikipedia’s entry for Clan Duncan simply redirects to Clan Robertson.

What is solid is the record of particular families. The Duncans of Lundie in Forfarshire were the leading house, holding the barony of Lundie and the Gourdie estate. Sir William Duncan was created a baronet in 1764. Adam Duncan, the admiral who broke the Dutch fleet at Camperdown on 11 October 1797, was created Viscount Duncan of Camperdown for it, and the Camperdown line ended with the death of the 4th Earl in 1933.

The Duncan tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans holds two Duncan setts, and these two are genuinely different threadcounts rather than shades of one another. Duncan, reference 1025, carries no date and no designer in the register. It appears in the tartan literature as “Duncan, or Leslie of Wardis” and is dated there to about 1880, which makes it a close relative of a Leslie pattern rather than an independent old sett; we have not been able to confirm that date at the register itself. No Wilsons of Bannockburn, Highland Society of London or Vestiarium Scoticum provenance has been found for it, and nothing is recorded about where it came from before about 1880.

Duncan of Sketraw, reference 5301, is openly modern: designed by Brian Wilton in 2005 from an earlier 1930s pattern, for John Duncan of Sketraw, and approved by the Clan Duncan Society. The third register entry under the name, H.M.S. Duncan, is a commemorative tartan for the ship and not a family sett.

A note on honesty: there is no registered Duncan Hunting and no registered Duncan Dress sett. Where mills list half a dozen Duncan cloths, those are weights and colourways — ancient, modern, muted, weathered, and in one case a blue rather than green ground — of reference 1025, not separate tartans. No Duncan sett predates the commercial era; the earliest anything under the name can be traced to is around 1880.

Clan facts

References

1. Duncan tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Clan Chieftains — Debrett’s
3. Duncan — The Tartan Dictionary