Weir Tartan

Clan Weir

The Weirs of Blackwood were a Lowland family of the parish of Lesmahagow in Lanarkshire. The earliest sourced record is from June 1398, when Rotaldo de Weir of Blackwood is styled bailie to Patrick, Abbot of Kelso in an inquisition concerning an annualrent from the barony of Lesmahagow, recorded in the Liber de Kelso, no. 517. About 1400 he acquired Blackwood and Dermoundston from the Abbot of Kelso by charter. The widely repeated story that the family descends from Radulphus de Vere, son of Aubrey de Vere, first Earl of Oxford, who came to Scotland in 1165 and was captured with William the Lion at Alnwick in 1174, appears without citation wherever it is told; the documented Blackwood pedigree contains no Radulphus and does not mention the 1165 arrival. Treat it as legend.

The descent from Rotaldo is well recorded. Thomas Weir settled a dispute with the Abbot of Kelso over dykes at Blackwood on 9 July 1432; Robert Weir was infeft in Blackwood, Rogerhill and Brownhill in 1479 as heir to his grandfather Roland; Thomas Weir succeeded on 24 October 1486, and Sir Alexander Weir on 27 January 1507. Thomas Weir of Moitt and Blackwood appears in the records of Parliament in 1528, and George Weir received a Great Seal confirmation on 10 June 1595. Sir George Weir was created a baronet on 28 November 1694. The male line of Blackwood ended with the third baronet, who died without issue in 1735, and in 1733 Catherine Weir had married Charles Hope of Craigiehall, who took the surname and arms of Weir of Blackwood and succeeded to the lands. That marriage is why the family’s registered tartans are filed under Hope-Vere.

The Weir tartan

There is one entry in the Scottish Register of Tartans under the plain name Weir — ref 4584, with a design date of 1 January 1880 — and five more filed as Hope-Vere or Hope-Weir (refs 1763, 1764, 1765, 1766 and 5719). A Weir Minerals tartan also exists; that is the engineering company, not the family.

Among the Hope-Vere group, Hope-Vere/Weir (Modern) is a colourway of ref 1763 rather than a separate design, and Hope-Vere (Lochcarron) is that mill’s rendering. The Register’s own numbering marks ref 1764 as a second, different design. Every one of the five has its designer and date recorded as not specified, and their low reference numbers mark them as legacy records inherited from the Scottish Tartans Authority and Scottish Tartans World Register. Their origin is genuinely unknown. The Weir and Hope Vere counts are the same structure in different colourings, which fits the 1733 marriage neatly, but the Register’s threadcount pages are the place to verify that for yourself.

A note on honesty: the source of the Weir sett is not recorded anywhere we can verify, and its date is disputed — the Register gives 1880, while the sample that reference databases work from is an unmarked Weir cloth in the MacGregor-Hastie collection, probably of the 1930s or 1940s. We cannot connect it to Wilsons of Bannockburn. Weir Modern, Ancient and Weathered are colourways, not separate tartans. There is also a second, unrelated Weir in Scotland: some Highland MacNairs anglicised their name to Weir, and the sept claims that attach Weir to Buchanan, MacFarlane and MacNaughton belong to that strand and are made without any authority being named.

Clan facts

References

1. Weir tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Hope-Vere and Hope-Weir tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
3. Weir of Blackwood — The Red Book of Scotland, citing the Liber de Kelso and the Register of the Great Seal
4. List of Scottish clans — Wikipedia, for the Weir entry, crest and armigerous status