Kincaid Tartan

Clan Kincaid

Kincaid is a territorial name taken from the property, not a patronymic. In 1238 Alexander II granted the lands of Kincade to Maldouen, 3rd Earl of Lennox, who granted them on to Sir William Galbraith; when the Galbraith line was divided among three sisters about 1280, one married a Logan and received Kyncade by charter from the 4th Earl of Lennox, and that family took the name of the land. The estate lay in the parish of Campsie — historically Stirlingshire, and in East Dunbartonshire since the 1975 reorganisation.

The clan’s favourite story, that a Kincaid helped recapture Edinburgh Castle in 1296 and that the castle was added to the arms as an augmentation under Robert I, is tradition: we could find no primary citation for it. What is dated is grimmer. Malcolm Kincaid lost his left arm in a skirmish in 1563 and was killed by a Stirling of Glorat in 1581 during the feud with the Lennoxes of Woodhead, and John Kincaid of Warriston was murdered in 1600 by a groom acting with his wife, who was beheaded for it. The chiefship fell dormant when John Lennox Kincaid died without male heirs. The Lord Lyon granted the petition of Alwyne Cecil Peareth Kincaid-Lennox on 1 July 1959, making him Alwyne Cecil Kincaid of Kincaid; his niece Heather Veronica Kincaid of Kincaid matriculated on 16 August 1988; and Madam Arabella Kincaid of Kincaid, her granddaughter, matriculated on 26 January 2001 and is the chief listed today by the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs.

The Kincaid tartan

There is one Kincaid design, and the several records of it differ only in transcription and scale. It was recorded on 30 March 1960 from the MacGregor-Hastie Collection; the source swatch was unmarked, and the collection’s own note is that it likely dates from somewhere between 1930 and 1950. That recording falls one year after the 1959 restoration of the chiefship, and the sequence is the interesting part — here the tartan follows the chief rather than the other way round.

It is not a Wilsons of Bannockburn pattern and it is not in the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842. The designer is not recorded. A claim that the sett was designed by Lochcarron of Scotland appears on retail pages, but it contradicts the MacGregor-Hastie provenance given on the same pages; Lochcarron weave the cloth today, which is not the same as having designed it, and we will not state it as fact.

A note on honesty: Kincaid Modern, Ancient, Weathered and Reproduction are colourways of this one sett, not separate tartans. No Kincaid sett predates the commercial era — the cloth itself is twentieth-century, probably from the 1930s or 1940s, whatever the thirteenth-century date on the lands. The motto is also given two ways, as noted below.

Clan facts

References

1. Kincaid tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Clan Kincaid — Wikipedia
3. Members of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs
4. Kincaid of Kincaid — The Tartan Dictionary