Clan MacQueen
The MacQueens, also written MacQuien and once known as Clan Revan, were a member family of the Clan Chattan confederation, seated at Corrybrough in Strathdearn in Inverness-shire with a cadet branch at Pollochaig. The tradition is that Revan MacMulmor MacAngus escorted a MacDonald bride to her marriage with Malcolm Beg Mackintosh around 1410 and settled in Strathdearn. That account comes from the seventeenth-century Kinrara chronicle rather than from any charter, and the personal names and the bride’s identity differ from one telling to the next.
The firm record is later. On 4 April 1609 Donald Macqueen of Corribrough signed with his own hand the Clan Chattan bond made at Termet, which bound the Chattan families in manrent to Mackintosh; the text is printed in Macfarlane’s Genealogical Collections. MacQueen presence at Harlaw in 1411, and the killing of the last wolf in Scotland by MacQueen of Pollochaig in 1743, are both reported as tradition rather than as established fact. Corrybrough eventually passed out of the family. The clan is armigerous today: there is no chief recognised by the Lord Lyon, no commander has been appointed, and the last chief is known only by the designation The MacQueen of Corrybrough.
The MacQueen tartan
One MacQueen sett is recorded: a black ground with broad red bands and a yellow line. Its source is the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, the Sobieski Stuart book since shown to be a forgery, and the register’s own note remarks that the sett appears to have been unnamed before that book attached it to the MacQueens.
Versions of the pattern woven at different scales are sometimes catalogued as though they were separate entries, but a change of scale is not a change of design. A MacQueen of Skye tartan appears in retail listings; its standing in the register could not be confirmed, and it should not be described as an old clan sett.
A note on honesty: Modern, Ancient and Weathered MacQueen are colourways of a single threadcount, not three tartans. There is no Wilsons of Bannockburn MacQueen pattern, no sett predating the commercial era, and nothing whatever that ties this design to the clan before 1842.
Clan facts
| Chief | None. Clan MacQueen is armigerous and forms part of the Clan Chattan confederation. |
|---|---|
| Motto | “Constant and Faithful” (English; no translation needed). Recorded by the Clan Chattan Association; the Lyon matriculation was not traced. |
| Plant badge | Boxwood, per the Clan Chattan Association. Sources conflict: red whortleberry is also given for the Chattan branch, and common heath for MacQueens in Skye. |
| Lands | Corrybrough and Pollochaig, Strathdearn, Inverness-shire |