Clan Ogilvy

Clan Ogilvy takes its name from the land rather than from a founder, and that land name is not Gaelic but Brittonic: Ocel-fa, the high plain. A Gaelic form, Mac Ghille Bhuidhe, is sometimes given, but the Ogilvys are an Angus house of Celtic comital descent rather than a Highland one. Gillebride, Earl of Angus, held the ground, and in 1163 William the Lion granted the barony of Ogilvie to his son Gilbert. The family took the name of the barony and stayed in Angus, holding the hereditary office of Sheriff of Angus from 1365. Their seats are Airlie Castle, built in 1432 and much altered in 1793, and Cortachy Castle near Kirriemuir.

Sir Alexander Ogilvy, sheriff of Angus, and his son George were killed at Harlaw in 1411, and on 24 January 1445 the clan, with men of Oliphant, Seton, Gordon and Forbes, fought the Master of Crawford and Clan Lindsay at Arbroath. Charles I raised the 7th Lord Ogilvy to Earl of Airlie in 1639. The following year the Campbell Earl of Argyll burned the Ogilvy stronghold, an episode that survives as the ballad and pipe tune The Bonnie Hoose o’ Airlie. The clan fought with Montrose at Inverlochy and Kilsyth in 1645; Lord Ogilvy was taken at Philiphaugh that year and escaped imprisonment with his sister’s help. In the rising of 1745 David Ogilvy raised a regiment composed largely of Ogilvys for Prince Charles Edward Stuart, fought with it at Culloden and escaped to France. The earldom lay under attainder until restored by Act of Parliament in 1896.

The Ogilvy tartan

Searching the Scottish Register of Tartans is instructive, because the spelling changes the answer. Under Ogilvy the Register returns five records: a plain Ogilvy, an Ogilvy #2 credited to Caird of Dundee, two entries filing the pattern under a double name as Drummond of Strathallan or Ogilvy, and a 2021 corporate tartan for the Canadian retailer Holt Renfrew Ogilvy, which has nothing to do with the clan. Under Ogilvie it returns ten more: numbered setts #1, #2, #3, #6 and #7, a black and white version filed under Fashion, an Ogilvie dated 1831 and credited to the collector James Logan, and three Inverarity patterns. One of those, Ogilvie of Inverarity (Wilsons’), is credited to Wilsons of Bannockburn, the Stirlingshire firm whose pattern books supplied most of the trade from the late eighteenth century.

The other two Inverarity setts carry a different designer. The Register names them Ogilvie of Inverarity – VS #1 and VS #2, and credits them to the Sobieski Stuarts.

A note on honesty: VS stands for Vestiarium Scoticum, and the Register is telling you where those setts came from. The Vestiarium was published in Edinburgh in 1842 by two brothers who called themselves the Sobieski Stuarts and claimed descent from Prince Charles Edward Stuart. They presented it as a copy of a fifteenth-century manuscript of clan tartans. It was denounced almost at once, Sir Walter Scott having doubted it in 1829, and in 1895 chemical analysis by Stevenson Macadam found the manuscript had been treated to make the writing look older than it was. It is a forgery, and it invented a great many of the clan tartans now taken as traditional. The rest of the Ogilvy record is scarcely older: Wilsons’ pattern was a weaver’s commercial design, Logan’s 1831 entry an antiquarian’s note, and the Register lists one sett as both Ogilvy and Drummond of Strathallan, which is what happens when a numbered mill pattern is sold to two customers and picks up two family names. Ogilvy Ancient and Weathered are dye shades of one threadcount, not separate tartans. Wear the cloth because you like it; do not believe anyone who tells you the sett is medieval.

Clan facts

References

1. Ogilvy tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Ogilvie tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
3. Clan Ogilvy