Wilsons of Bannockburn were weaving this pattern under the name Cobourg a dozen years before anybody called it a Graham tartan.
Cobourg, 1819
The first record of the sett is commercial and has nothing to do with the family. Wilsons of Bannockburn entered it in 1819 as Cobourg, one of a run of patterns the firm named after fashionable subjects rather than clans. By 1831 it was being described as a Graham tartan, and the sett that R. R. McIan used in his clan illustrations appears to be this one. The broad blue band is recorded in the older descriptions as smalt, the cobalt-glass blue of the dyers. The Clan Graham Society is candid that the origins are not fully documented and that the pattern’s antiquity has been questioned, which is the right position to take on a sett whose earliest recorded name was not a family name at all.
Two neighbouring patterns are easy to confuse with it. A District of Menteith tartan, placed at around 1800, carries white stripes where this one has blue. Graham of Menteith Red is a Kinloch Anderson design of 1980, made by putting red where the green sits.
An earldom given in exchange for one taken away
The Graham earls of Menteith begin with a confiscation. Malise Graham, born about 1407, was a grandson of Robert II through his mother Euphemia Stewart and held the earldom of Strathearn in her right. James I used Graham’s minority to take Strathearn into the crown and gave him Menteith instead, by a charter dated 6 September 1427. What he received amounted to parts of the parishes of Aberfoyle and Port of Menteith — a fraction of what had been taken. Two months after the charter he was sent to England as a hostage for the king, and he was held, largely at Pontefract, until 17 June 1453, more than a quarter of a century. He lived until 1490. On one reckoning of the succession he was, between 1437 and 1451, heir to the Scottish throne.
The reddest blood in Scotland
William Graham, seventh Earl of Menteith, set out to recover Strathearn, arguing that the earldom had descended in the male line and so reverted to him. Charles I granted it in 1631. His enemies then reported that he had claimed to have the reddest blood in Scotland, and that the king owed him his crown — a remark he denied, which cannot now be tested, and which did the damage it was meant to do. The patent was revoked in 1633 and he received the earldom of Airth in its place. He was confined to Airth for four years and restored in 1637. Monck’s campaign wrecked his lands, and he sold most of them to clear his debts before dying in 1661. The line ended with the second Earl of Airth, who died in 1694, and the titles have been dormant ever since; petitions in 1834, 1840 and 1870, resting on descent through a female line, produced no decision either way.
Who it is for
There is no earl of Menteith and no separate chief of the Menteith Grahams, so nobody grants or withholds this sett. The chief of the name is the Duke of Montrose, and anyone of the name Graham may take either group of Graham patterns. What distinguishes this one is geography rather than descent: it is the sett attached to the western Graham country about the Lake of Menteith and the Forth carselands, and it is the pattern generally used to mark that connection. As with the Montrose patterns, the settings offered by weavers differ in dye rather than in the arrangement of the threads.
Sources: Clan Graham Society, notes on the Graham tartans; CLAN, design notes on the Graham of Menteith sett; Wikipedia, Malise Graham, 1st Earl of Menteith, William Graham, 7th Earl of Menteith, and Earl of Airth; R. R. McIan, The Clans of the Scottish Highlands, as cited in those accounts.