Dalrymple Tartan

Clan Dalrymple

The Dalrymples take their name from the lands of Dalrymple in Ayrshire, on the Doon south of Ayr. Thomas de Dalrympylle appears on the Ragman Roll of 1296, swearing fealty to Edward I as a tenant of the Lord of Berwick. The family did not keep its name-place for long — the barony passed to John Kennedy of Dunure in the 1370s — and the Dalrymple fortune was made instead in law and government, which is the honest shape of this family’s history.

Sir James Dalrymple (1619–1695), Lord President of the Court of Session and author of the Institutions of the Law of Scotland, was created Viscount of Stair. His son John (1648–1707) was Lord Advocate and joint Secretary of State for Scotland, and as Master of Stair was the political author of the massacre of Glencoe on 13 February 1692; he was forced to resign in 1695 over his part in it. Created Earl of Stair in April 1703, he was a leading promoter of the Union: Article XXII, on Scottish representation at Westminster, was approved on 7 January 1707, and he died the next day, before the Union took effect. Unusually among Lowland families of this kind, Dalrymple has a chief. The Earl of Stair sits on the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs as head of the name, and the present holder is John David James Dalrymple, 14th Earl of Stair, who succeeded in 1996. The seats are Lochinch Castle at Castle Kennedy in Wigtownshire and Oxenfoord Castle in Midlothian, which came to the family in 1779 and was rebuilt from 1780 by Robert Adam, with further work by William Burn in 1842.

The Dalrymple tartan

There is no plain Dalrymple clan sett in the Scottish Register of Tartans. Anything sold as Dalrymple tartan is in practice Dalrymple of Castleton, and that is worth saying at the outset rather than leaving a customer to discover it.

Dalrymple of Castleton is a twentieth-century reconstruction rather than a surviving historic pattern. The record is explicit: reconstructed and woven by Don Rankin from an illustration — a portrait — with the sample held in the Scottish Tartans Society collection. It is not a Wilsons of Bannockburn pattern and it is not from the Vestiarium Scoticum; it is a modern reading of what a painter put on canvas. Two cloths are recorded under the name, differing by the substitution of green for the blue blocks, which makes them one sett in two colourways. The dates attached to it conflict: the register’s own listing gives 1743, while other databases date the source portrait to 1720. A separate tartan, Dalrymple, M, of Oxenfoord, is registered under the Name category as a personal tartan and is not clan cloth.

A note on honesty: Ancient, Modern, Weathered and Muted Dalrymple of Castleton are colourways of one threadcount, not separate tartans. No Dalrymple sett predates the commercial era, and this one is later still — a reconstruction from a picture, made within living memory. Who registered it, and when, is not recorded in anything we were able to verify, so we will not name a registrant.

Clan facts

References

1. Dalrymple tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Members — The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs
3. John Dalrymple, 1st Earl of Stair — Glencoe and the Union
4. Dalrymple of Castleton — Tartan Dictionary