Symbols on Scottish Clan Crests and What They Mean

Reading a clan crest badge

Almost every gift shop between Edinburgh and Inverness sells them: a small silver or pewter badge showing a stag's head, a boar, or a hand gripping a sword, ringed by a strap and buckle. It is worth knowing what you are actually looking at before you pin one to a jacket. The device in the middle is not the clan's crest — it is the chief's crest, a single element lifted from his personal coat of arms. The strap and buckle around it, with the motto lettered across the leather, mark the wearer as a follower or supporter of that chief. Historically, only the chief and his immediate family wore the crest within a plain circlet. Everyone else wore the buckle, and that distinction still holds.

Under Scots law, arms are a form of property. The Lord Lyon King of Arms regulates them, granting and matriculating them and entering them in the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland, an arrangement formalised by statute in 1672. It is not lawful simply to assume another family's arms. A crest badge, though, is a badge of allegiance rather than a claim of descent — which is why wearing one is a gesture of affinity, not an act of impersonation.

Stags, boars and other beasts

Animals do most of the work in Scottish heraldry, and the heraldic vocabulary is worth learning because it is wonderfully precise.

• Stags. The stag's head is the commonest crest in the Highlands. The MacKenzies bear a stag's head cabossed — facing the viewer, neck hidden — properly coloured, with antlers attired in gold. Their motto, Luceo non uro ("I shine, not burn"), sits oddly beside it and is said to recall a beacon lit on a hill to warn of approach rather than to destroy.
• Boars. The Campbells of Argyll bear a boar's head fessways couped — set horizontally and cut cleanly across — in gold. The Gordons carry three boars' heads on their shield, yet their crest is a stag's head, a neat reminder that arms and crest are separate things.
• Lions. The MacGregors use a lion's head erased, meaning torn off with a jagged edge rather than a clean cut, beneath the Gaelic motto S Rioghal Mo Dhream — "my race is royal". It is a bold claim for a clan so often outlawed.
• Bulls. MacLeod of MacLeod bears a bull's head cabossed in black, armed and langued in red — horns and tongue picked out in colour — under the blunt instruction Hold fast.

The wildcat and the glove

Few crests are as well known as the seated wildcat of the Macphersons and MacIntoshes, paired with the motto Touch not the cat bot a glove. "Bot" is old Scots for "without": do not meddle with the cat unless you are properly armed for it. The Sutherlands use a similar cat, seated and proper (in natural colours), with the French motto Sans peur — without fear. It is a rare example of a crest and a motto that quite literally describe one another.

Burning hills, galleys and stranger devices

Not every crest is an animal, and the inanimate ones often carry the deepest history.

• The burning hill. The Grants bear a burning mount, with the motto Stand fast. It echoes the crann tara, the fiery cross carried through the glens to summon a clan to arms — a signal that could be seen from one hillside to the next.
• The galley. A Norse-style longship appears in the arms of the MacDonalds, MacDougalls, MacNeils and MacKinnons, all of them heirs to the sea-kingdom of the Lordship of the Isles. Where you see a galley, you are looking at a family whose power once travelled by water.
• The salamander. The Douglases use a salamander in flames, with Jamais arrière — never behind.
• The hand and dagger. The Chisholms show a hand holding a dagger, with the uncompromising Feros ferio: I am fierce with the fierce.
• The rock. MacNeil of Barra keeps it simple: a rock, and Vincere vel mori — to conquer or die.

Mottoes: Latin, Gaelic and plain Scots

Scottish mottoes are not granted by the Lyon Court in the way that shields and crests are, which means families have changed them over the centuries, and spellings vary between one carving and the next. You will find Latin, French, Gaelic and blunt Lowland Scots side by side. The MacLeans declare Virtue mine honour. The Campbells use Ne obliviscaris, "forget not". The MacDonalds have Per mare per terras, by sea and by land. The Camerons rally to Aonaibh ri chéile, "unite". When you see a motto carved over a doorway or stamped on a musket barrel, you are reading a family's chosen attitude rather than a legal record.

Where to see the real thing

If you want to see crests in their proper context rather than on a shop rack, a few places repay a visit.

• Castle gateways and lintels. Look above doors at Dunvegan, Inveraray, Cawdor and Blair for carved arms of the chiefly family, complete with helm, mantling and crest.
• Kirk yards and gravestones. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slabs often carry a crest and motto, sometimes weathered to a ghost.
• Highland games and clan gatherings. The clan tent is the easiest place to ask which badge is appropriate for your own connection, however distant.
• The Lyon Office in Edinburgh. The register itself is a working archive, and enquiries about a possible matriculation begin there.

Buy your badge from a maker who is clear about what the strap and buckle mean, and wear it as it was intended: not as a claim to a castle you have never seen, but as a nod of respect to a name, a landscape and a long memory.