Clan Donald

Clan Donald descends from Somerled, the twelfth-century ruler styled King of the Hebrides, who died in 1164, and takes its name from his grandson Domhnall mac Raghnaill, who died about 1250. From Islay, Kintyre and the Inner Hebrides its chiefs ruled a sea kingdom that rivalled the Scottish crown itself.

They held the Earldom of Ross until it was forfeited in 1475 and the Lordship of the Isles until its forfeiture in 1493. Donald of Islay led a large army at Harlaw in 1411. After the Lordship fell the clan continued through its branches — Sleat, Clanranald, Glengarry, Keppoch and Glencoe — and was prominent in the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, fighting at Culloden in April 1746. Thirty-eight MacDonalds of Glencoe were killed in the massacre of 1692.

The MacDonald tartan

The tartan’s documented history begins comparatively late. The oldest surviving named specimen is in the Cockburn Collection, held by Glasgow Libraries and assembled between about 1810 and 1820, where it is labelled simply “Lord Macdonald”. William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn, the great commercial weavers of the period, were producing a Lord Macdonald pattern by about 1800.

By around 1830 to 1840 the same sett was being sold by bespoke tailors as MacDonald of the Isles. The Sobieski Stuart brothers published their own MacDonald of the Isles in the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, a book later shown to be a fabrication although its patterns passed into general use, and Smith Brothers published MacDonald of Slate in 1850. The many branch setts recorded since are later refinements of this family of patterns rather than independent survivals.

A note on honesty: the medieval genealogies tracing Somerled to the Irish High Kings are legend rather than record, and no evidence was found that a MacDonald specimen was among those certified to the Highland Society of London in 1815 or 1816.

Clan facts

References

1. MacDonald tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. A Short History of Tartan — The High Council of Clan Donald
3. The Lord of the Isles Tartans — Peter Eslea MacDonald
4. The Cockburn Collection — Glasgow Libraries