Malcolm Tartan

Clan Malcolm

Malcolm and MacCallum are one chiefly house under two names. The Gaelic is Mac Ghille Chaluim, son of the servant of Columba. Despite the obvious temptation there is no recorded descent from the Kings Malcolm; the surname and the royal name simply share the personal name Máel Coluim, devotee of Columba, and no genealogical connection to the royal house is on record either way. The earliest dated record is 1414, when Reginald MacCallum of Corbarron was granted lands in Craignish by Sir Duncan Campbell of Lochow, together with the hereditary constableship of the castles of Craignish and Lochaffy. Poltalloch at Kilmartin in Argyll was the family’s principal residence from the sixteenth century. The two names are not quite interchangeable as surnames, whatever the trade says: the historian Ian Grimble pointed out that Malcolm occurs as a surname in Dunbartonshire and Stirlingshire from the fourteenth century, independently of the Argyll MacCallums.

Dugald MacCallum, ninth of Poltalloch, adopted the surname Malcolm in the later eighteenth century. The year is disputed — one tartan record gives 1770, while other accounts connect the change to his inheritance of the Malcolm estates in 1779 — and the reason is not securely recorded, one account suggesting the inheritance and another simple preference. Duntrune Castle on Loch Crinan, bought from the Campbells in the 1790s (sources give 1792 and 1796), is the chiefly seat today. Malcolm is one of the minority of families of this kind with a chief: Malcolm of Poltalloch sits on the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs. Robin Neill Lochnell Malcolm, 19th of Poltalloch, died on 2 March 2024 and was succeeded by his eldest son as 20th of Poltalloch. Sources give the new chief’s forename variously as Ian, Iain and Ian Rory, and at the time of writing the clan society’s own page still awaited the naming of a successor, so we will not state a single full name.

The Malcolm tartan

The Malcolm sett is a Wilsons of Bannockburn pattern. The Scottish Tartans World Register notes that Wilsons produced a symmetrical version recorded in their 1847 pattern book, and that the gold and azure in the sett come from the family’s armorial bearings. A separate and genuinely distinct record, Malcolm (1840), is asymmetric and uses two different reds; its threadcount was taken by Peter MacDonald, the recognised authority on the Wilsons records, from a Wilsons sample book he dates to about 1840. Nothing Malcolm comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, and no designer is recorded for any Malcolm sett.

The Malcolm tartan is not the MacCallum tartan, and this is worth being exact about, because the trade has blurred the two for a century. The Malcolm sett is a fourteen-stripe pattern in black, green, dark blue and red with yellow and azure accents. The MacCallum sett is a seven-stripe pattern in green, black, light blue and dark blue with no red in it at all. They are separately registered and structurally different. The MacCallum pattern has a striking history of its own: D. W. Stewart recorded in 1893 that the family, having lost track of the old sett some fifty or sixty years earlier, had the design reconstructed from the recollection of elderly people in Argyllshire, and that when the original was eventually recovered it proved to differ considerably.

A note on honesty: Ancient, Modern, Weathered and Muted Malcolm are colourways of one threadcount, not separate tartans, and the several Malcolm Dress entries are renderings of a single dress design rather than several designs. The provenance of that dress pattern is not recorded. No Malcolm sett predates the commercial era; the earliest documented records are Wilsons pattern books of about 1840 to 1847. Malcolm Hotel and Malcolm de Cunningham are a corporate and a commemorative tartan respectively and have nothing to do with the clan.

Clan facts

References

1. Malcolm tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Members — The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs
3. Chief and Duntrune — Clan MacCallum–Malcolm Society
4. Clan MacCallum–Malcolm Society mourns the loss of its chief — COSCA