MacLellan Tartan

Clan MacLellan

The MacLellans belong to eastern Galloway. The earliest date attached to the name is 1273, where it appears as McGillolane in a charter connected with Sweetheart Abbey, though we have not been able to check that charter against a scholarly edition and the clan society’s own history does not cite it — the society’s earliest dated item is Gilbert McLellan’s election as Bishop of Man in 1320. The family held Bombie, Loch Fergus, Orchardton and Etoun; the earliest land grant the society names explicitly is a charter of Loch Fergus and other lands to William Maclellan of Bombie in 1471. The lands were lost in the seventeenth century to creditors and forfeiture.

In 1451 Sir Patrick Maclellan, sheriff of Galloway, was killed by William, 8th Earl of Douglas, and the reprisals that followed contributed to the fall of the Black Douglases. Sir Thomas MacLellan, provost of Kirkcudbright, took a charter around 1570 and had built MacLellan’s Castle in the town by 1582, partly with stone robbed from the neighbouring Greyfriars church and from Bombie and Raeberry castles. Its roof was taken off in 1752 and it is now a ruin in the care of Historic Environment Scotland. Sir Robert MacLellan was created Lord Kirkcudbright in 1633. The peerage then had a troubled run — dormant from the late 1660s until 1721, revived in holders who kept an alehouse and worked as a glover in Edinburgh — and ended with the death of the last Lord in 1832. Sources disagree whether he was the ninth or the tenth; all agree on the year.

The MacLellan tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans holds one Clan or Family entry under the MacLellan spelling (reference 2621) and one under the MacClellan spelling (2313). They carry different legacy archive numbers, so they are two separate records, but because the register’s detail pages will not load we cannot tell you whether they are two distinct threadcounts or one sett filed under two spellings, and we will not guess.

Three further entries — MacLellan/McLellan, MacLellan/McLellan Dress and MacLellan/McLellan Hunting — are registered in the Name category as personal tartans designed by J. R. MacLellan. They are not clan tartans, whatever a listing calls them. Provenance for the clan sett itself is thin: no weaver, no pattern book and no collection has been established for it. MacLellan does not appear in the Vestiarium Scoticum, and no Wilsons of Bannockburn or Highland Society of London attribution has been found. One commercial source states the modern version derives from a larger sett supplied from Georgia in the United States, which if true makes it a twentieth-century American-sourced specimen rather than an old Scottish one; we have only the one source for that.

A note on honesty: MacLellan Modern, Ancient, Muted and Weathered are mill shade palettes applied to the one sett, not separate tartans, and there is no registered MacLellan Hunting or Dress clan sett — the ones bearing those words are the personal registrations noted above. The earliest date any MacLellan sett can be traced to is simply not recorded, and no sett predates the commercial era. Claims that MacLellan tartan has been worn since the 1300s have no documentary basis, as is true of every clan tartan.

Clan facts

References

1. MacLellan tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. History of Clan MacLellan — Clan MacLellan Society
3. MacLellan’s Castle — Historic Environment Scotland
4. Lord Kirkcudbright — Wikipedia