Dalziel Tartan

Clan Dalziel

Dalziel takes its name from the barony of Dalzell in Lanarkshire, the ground now covered by Motherwell. The name is first recorded in 1259, and Thomas de Dalzell fought at Bannockburn in 1314; one commercial account places a Thomas de Dalzell in a charter of Alexander II between 1214 and 1249, but 1259 is the date with a record behind it. The gap between spelling and pronunciation — Dee-ell or Dal-yell against a written z — is a scribal accident rather than a mystery. The name was written with the Middle Scots letter yogh, and when yogh fell out of use scribes replaced it either with z, which it resembled in the hand of the day, or with y, which matched the sound. The underlying form is usually taken to be Gaelic dail-gheal, the bright or white dale.

Robert Dalzell was created Lord Dalzell in September 1628, and his son Robert, 2nd Lord, was created Earl of Carnwath in April 1639 by Charles I. The 5th Earl was attainted for treason in 1716 for his part in the Jacobite rising and the titles forfeited; the attainder was reversed by Act of Parliament in May 1826 and the titles restored to his grandson as 6th Earl. The earldom has been dormant since the death of the 13th Earl in 1941. The estates had gone long before that, sold to the Hamiltons of Orbiston in 1645, so the family held its own name-place for only part of its recorded history. A cadet line, the Dalyells of the Binns in West Lothian, bought those lands in 1612 and rebuilt the house between 1621 and 1630. General Thomas Dalyell of the Binns, “Bluidy Tam” (1615–1685), escaped the Tower in 1652, served in Russia, commanded in Scotland, and in November 1681 was commissioned to raise the regiment that became the Royal Scots Greys, mustering it at the Binns. The house passed to the National Trust for Scotland in 1944, the family keeping residence.

The Dalziel tartan

The register holds two Dalziel setts, one undated and one dated 1822. They belong to the same design family — a red ground with green blocks and narrow blue or purple guards with white lines — but the pivot proportions genuinely differ, so they are two related setts rather than one sett in two colourways. No designer is recorded for either.

The 1822 date is the useful clue. The Scottish Tartans Authority notes that the basic form of the design was used for a George IV tartan produced in honour of the king’s visit to Scotland in that year — the visit, stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott, that did more than anything else to create the modern clan tartan trade. The same note observes that Dalziel resembles the Munro, which is a structural observation and not a claim of shared ancestry. Neither sett comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842.

A note on honesty: nothing is registered as Dalzell or Dalyell, so cloth sold under those spellings is the Dalziel sett. Ancient, Modern, Weathered and Muted Dalziel are colourways, not tartans in their own right, and neither sett predates the commercial era. The motto “I dare” is genuine and the arms do show a man hanging from a gallows, but the story behind them — that a kinsman’s body hung on a Pictish gibbet until one man said dal zell, I dare, and cut it down — is an origin legend written down by Sir Robert Douglas in 1764, working backwards from the motto and the arms to explain the name. The linguistic evidence points to dail-gheal instead.

Clan facts

References

1. Dalziel tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Dalziel — the name, the yogh and the 1259 record
3. Earl of Carnwath — creations, attainder and dormancy
4. House of the Binns — the Dalyell cadet line