Clan Gow

Gow is an occupational name. It comes from the Gaelic gobha, a smith, and it arose independently wherever a smith’s trade became a family byname, which means that two Gows need not be related at all. In Scottish record the name is not an independent clan. It is carried as a sept of Clan Macpherson within the Clan Chattan confederation, and its bearers are known in Gaelic as Sliochd a’ Ghobha Chrom, the race of the crooked smith. The traditional founder is Henry Wynd, also called Henry Smith, a Perth smith or armourer who fought as a hired substitute on the Clan Chattan side at the judicial combat on the North Inch of Perth in 1396 and was one of the few to survive it. He was afterwards invited north to join the clan and is said to have settled in Strath Avon in Banffshire. The Gows are recorded as having taken Clan Chattan protection around 1399.

That origin story should be read as tradition rather than documentation, and the page is better served by what can be dated. The clan the Gows attached to, Macpherson, held Badenoch, fought Clan Cameron at Invernahavon in 1370 and at the North Inch in 1396, was at Glenlivet in 1594, and came out in both the 1715 and 1745 risings, ending at Culloden in 1746. The best-known bearer of the name by some distance is the fiddler Niel Gow, born at Strathbraan near Dunkeld on 22 March 1727 and dead at Inver on 1 March 1807, three weeks short of eighty. He spent fifty years in a broom-thatched cottage at Inver, rent-free, drew an annuity from the Duke and Duchess of Atholl for playing at Dunkeld House and Blair Castle, was painted several times by Sir Henry Raeburn, and is buried in Little Dunkeld churchyard; his original headstone was moved indoors to the Chapter House Museum in 1950. His son Nathaniel carried the music on.

The Gow tartan

A search of the Scottish Register of Tartans for Gow returns sixty-six records, and almost all of them are Glasgow, Gowrie, Ardgowan and the like. Under the name itself there are five. Gow is recorded as a clan and family tartan with no designer named and a design date of 1 January 2003. Gow (Portrait) sits in the Other category. Gow Hunting and Gow Hunting #2 are both clan and family setts with no designer and no date of record. Gow, Gray is a personal tartan recorded by The House of Edgar on 24 November 2020.

What is not there is as telling as what is. There is no Gow pattern in the Wilsons of Bannockburn books, and no Gow plate in the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842. The two sources that gave most of the older clan tartans their patterns simply do not contain this name.

A note on honesty: the tartan sold as Gow is a modern design. The Register dates the clan and family sett to 2003 and records no designer for it, which puts it inside living memory and a long way from anything Henry Wynd or Niel Gow put on. The two Gow Hunting setts are undated trade patterns with no attribution at all. Gow Ancient, Modern and Weathered are not separate tartans and hold no separate records; they are one threadcount woven in lighter, standard or muted dye shades. None of this makes a Gow kilt wrong to wear. It does mean that a Gow looking for a sett with documented age behind it would be on firmer historical ground in Macpherson, the clan the name is actually attached to, than in a pattern designed in 2003.

Clan facts

References

1. Gow tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Gow (sept)
3. Niel Gow — Historic Dunkeld