Clan Urquhart
The Urquharts belong to Cromarty and the Black Isle, between the Cromarty and Moray Firths. The first chief who appears in written Scottish record is William de Urchard, active in the late thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century; the place-name Airchart occurs much earlier, in the Life of St Columba, but that is a place rather than evidence of the family. Adam de Urchard became Baron and Sheriff of Cromarty about 1358, and from the reign of David II the chiefs held the sheriffship by heredity.
Seven sons of Thomas Urquhart were killed at Pinkie Cleugh in 1547. The most celebrated of the name is Sir Thomas Urquhart, knighted by Charles I in 1641, translator of Rabelais into English and a prisoner after Worcester in 1651. Captain John Urquhart fought at Sheriffmuir in 1715. The chiefly seat was at Meldrum from 1741 until 1898, when Major Beauchamp Urquhart, the last of that line, was killed at the Battle of the Atbara in the Sudan and the chiefship passed to the Braelangwell branch. In 1959 the Lord Lyon recognised Wilkins Fisk Urquhart as Chief of the Name, counted the 26th chief; Kenneth Trist Urquhart followed as 27th from 1974, and Colonel Wilkins Fisk Urquhart of Urquhart has been 28th chief since 2012.
The Urquhart tartan
The Scottish Register of Tartans holds six Urquhart records. Four are clan tartans: Urquhart, reference 4431, dated 1815; Urquhart (Logan), reference 4433, dated 1831; Urquhart (White Line), reference 4430, dated 1842; and Urquhart (Brydone), reference 4429, dated 1862. The other two are Urquhart (Fashion), reference 4432, dated 1980, and Urquhart Castle, reference 14821, a corporate tartan registered in 2024.
The main Urquhart sett traces to a sample in the Cockburn Collection of about 1815 and was recorded at Lyon Court on 14 October 1991. The white-line sett of 1842 comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum, the Sobieski Stuart book of that year whose supposed ancient source was shown in 1895 to have been chemically aged; it too was recorded at Lyon Court in 1991. The 1831 pattern comes from James Logan’s The Scottish Gael and the 1862 one from the MacGregor Hastie collection, attributed to James Brydone; both are unofficial. No Urquhart sett appears to come from Wilsons of Bannockburn.
A note on honesty: this is the one clan where the usual rule about names does not hold. “Urquhart Ancient” in the trade normally means the white-line Vestiarium design, which is a genuinely different threadcount, not a paler dye version of the 1815 sett — so here Ancient is a separate tartan, and you should check which you are buying. Urquhart Broad Red, by contrast, really is a colourway of the 1815 sett, and Modern, Weathered and Muted are colourways too. No Urquhart sett predates the commercial era: the earliest is 1815, more than four centuries after the first chief enters record.
Clan facts
| Chief | Colonel Wilkins Fisk Urquhart of Urquhart, 28th Chief, since 2012 |
|---|---|
| Motto | Meane weil, speak weil and doe weil — in modern spelling, “Mean well, speak well and do well”. It is English, not Latin |
| Plant badge | Wallflower |
| Lands | Cromarty and the Black Isle, later also Aberdeenshire. Sources conflict on the seat: Castle Craig on the Cromarty Firth is given by the clan society as the ancient fortress, while Craigston Castle in Aberdeenshire is named elsewhere. |