Clan Rattray

Origin: A Name Older Than the Clan System

The name Rattray does not follow the familiar Gaelic or Norse patterns that underlie most Scottish clan names. It is Pictish — and in that distinction lies something remarkable. The Picts were the pre-Gaelic inhabitants of much of northern and eastern Scotland, a people who left behind mysterious carved symbol stones, a handful of inscriptions in an undeciphered script, and place-names that have proved extraordinarily durable across the fifteen centuries since Gaelic began to supplant their language. Rattray is one of those names.

The place-name resolves into two Pictish or early Brittonic elements: rath, meaning a fort or fortified enclosure (cognate with the Irish rath, the characteristic circular earthwork of early medieval Ireland), and treabh, meaning a homestead or settlement. Together they yield "fort homestead" — a description of a defended habitation of some significance, the kind of place that would have served as a local power centre in the pre-medieval landscape of Perthshire. The settlement name predates any Norman or Gaelic surname by many centuries, and when the family that became the Rattrays took their name from the place, they were adopting an identity already deep-rooted in the local landscape.

This place-name origin is significant in another way: it means the Rattrays were a territorial family in the most literal sense — not a family that gave its name to a place, but a family that took its name from one. The barony, the land, the ancient fort homestead came first; the family's identity was moulded around it. In the lexicon of Scottish clan origins, this is unusual and speaks to an antiquity that the Gaelic patronymic system does not easily accommodate.

Territory: The Barony of Rattray and Craighall Castle

The Rattray heartland lies in the gently undulating landscape of eastern Perthshire, in the fertile lowland corridor between the Highland edge and the Angus glens. The Barony of Rattray centred on the district between Blairgowrie and Coupar Angus — a landscape of soft-fruit farmland, water meadows, and the River Ericht carving its wooded gorge through the sandstone bedrock.

Craighall Castle, the ancestral seat of the Rattrays, is one of the most dramatically situated houses in Scotland. Built into the face of a sandstone cliff above the River Ericht, the castle — or rather the sequence of buildings that have occupied the site over the centuries — appears to grow from the rock itself. The pink-red sandstone of the cliff and the walls are of a piece; from below, looking up from the riverbank, it is difficult to determine where geology ends and architecture begins. The site is visible from the A93 road between Blairgowrie and Coupar Angus, and it rewards the traveller who pauses to look — one of those Scottish landmarks that photographs inadequately and rewards the actual visit.

The barony extended across parishes that are still named for the family's influence: the Parish of Rattray, now merged administratively with Blairgowrie, preserves the name in the landscape. The town of Blairgowrie itself grew up alongside Rattray on the opposite bank of the Ericht, and the two communities were for centuries distinct — Rattray the older settlement with its noble and ecclesiastical associations, Blairgowrie the emerging burgh with commercial energy. Today they are effectively one town, united in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the topographic distinction remains clear to anyone who walks from one bank to the other.

History: Montrose, the Covenanters, and a Jacobite Legacy

The Civil War and Montrose's Campaign

The mid-seventeenth century brought Scotland into a period of catastrophic civil war, religious conflict, and political revolution that touched every family of consequence in the country. The Rattrays of Craighall emerged on the royalist side when James Graham, first Marquess of Montrose, raised the standard for King Charles I in 1644 and conducted one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in Scottish history — a year of rapid marching, improvised battles, and brilliant tactical victories across the Highlands that temporarily reversed the Covenanting ascendancy before collapsing as suddenly as it had risen.

Silvester Rattray was among those who joined Montrose's army in 1644–45. The campaign's battles were fought across Scotland — at Tippermuir near Perth in September 1644, where Montrose's Highland and Irish force routed a much larger Covenanting army; at Aberdeen; at Inverlochy; at Auldearn; and at Kilsyth in August 1645, Montrose's most complete victory, fought in the central belt of Scotland and opening the road to Edinburgh. Rattray's involvement in this campaign placed the family on the losing side when Montrose's fortunes reversed: within a month of Kilsyth, the army was destroyed at Philiphaugh, and the Covenanters reimposed their authority across Scotland. Families who had followed Montrose paid in fines, in forfeited lands, and in the social stigma of having backed the wrong cause.

The Jacobite Risings

The Rattrays emerged again as active participants in Scottish political conflict during the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century. The Jacobite cause — the effort to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty to the British throne following the Revolution of 1688 — divided Scotland along complex lines of religion, clan loyalty, and regional interest. The Rattrays of Craighall were Jacobite sympathisers, and they acted on that sympathy in the rising of 1715, when the Earl of Mar raised the Jacobite standard at Braemar and an army marched south toward the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir.

Members of the Rattray family fought again in 1745–46, the final and most dramatic of the Jacobite campaigns, when Prince Charles Edward Stuart — Bonnie Prince Charlie — landed in the western Highlands and rallied an army that briefly captured Edinburgh, routed a government force at Prestonpans, and marched south into England before the fatal retreat to Culloden. The Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746 ended the rising in a rout; the government's subsequent pacification of the Highlands was systematic and brutal, involving executions, transportation, and the deliberate suppression of Highland culture. For families like the Rattrays, whose Jacobite loyalties were known, the aftermath brought forfeitures, legal proceedings, and the dispersal of family members across the Atlantic world.

John Rattray: Physician, Golfer, and the First Champion

If one figure from Clan Rattray transcends the local and the genealogical to claim a place in global history, it is John Rattray — physician of Edinburgh, Jacobite soldier, and the first recorded golf champion in the world.

Born in 1707, John Rattray was trained as a surgeon and physician and practised medicine in Edinburgh during one of the most intellectually vibrant periods in the city's history — the early decades of what would become the Scottish Enlightenment, when Edinburgh's medical schools, legal societies, and literary clubs were beginning to produce the ideas that would shape the modern world. He was a man of education, social standing, and clearly considerable physical ability.

The timing of that second victory, in 1745, is everything in the story of John Rattray. In the same year that he won the Silver Club for the second time, Prince Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland. Rattray, like others in Edinburgh society with Jacobite sympathies, joined the Prince's cause. He was present at the Battle of Prestonpans on 21 September 1745, where the Jacobite army routed the government force under Sir John Cope in a matter of minutes — the battle that inspired the Scots song "Hey, Johnnie Cope." As a physician, Rattray attended the wounded on the field.

When the campaign ended in defeat at Culloden seven months later, John Rattray was captured. He faced the real possibility of execution — the government was determined to make examples of prominent Jacobites. His salvation came from an unlikely source: Sir John Cope himself, the general whose defeat at Prestonpans Rattray had witnessed, interceded on Rattray's behalf, apparently in recognition of the humane treatment Rattray had shown to government soldiers wounded in that battle. Cope's intervention secured Rattray's pardon, and the physician returned to Edinburgh, where he continued to practise medicine until his death in 1771.

John Rattray's life encapsulates the contradictions of eighteenth-century Scotland in miniature: a man simultaneously at the cutting edge of urban professional culture in Edinburgh and a participant in the most romanticised, most consequential, and most catastrophic political adventure of the age. That the man who played golf on Leith Links in the morning also tended Jacobite wounded at Prestonpans is not an irony but a description of how fully human beings inhabit their historical moment — occupying its pleasures and its dangers with equal commitment.

Researching Rattray Ancestry

Perthshire is well served by surviving historical records, making Rattray ancestry research more tractable than for many Highland clans. The ScotlandsPeople database holds digitised Old Parish Registers for the key Rattray parishes — Blairgowrie, the Parish of Rattray, Alyth, and Coupar Angus — and these are the starting point for any search before civil registration began in 1855. Baptism registers from these parishes can take research back to the late seventeenth century; earlier records exist in some cases but gaps are common.

The Perth and Kinross Archive, located in Perth, holds estate records for the Barony of Rattray — rental books, legal papers, and correspondence that provide a fuller picture of family history than parish registers alone can offer. Estate records are particularly valuable for establishing the relationship between tenant families and the principal family, and for tracing the movements of those who left the barony before emigrating.

The Rattray diaspora extended to North America from the colonial period onward. Significant numbers settled in Virginia and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, joining the broader Scots and Scots-Irish migration to the American mid-Atlantic and southern colonies. Canadian settlement came later, particularly after 1783 when Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution moved north into Upper Canada, and again during the waves of assisted emigration in the early nineteenth century.

For those tracing Rattray ancestry in North America, the relevant resources include the Virginia Historical Society and the Library of Virginia for colonial-period records, the Pennsylvania State Archives for early Pennsylvania records, and Library and Archives Canada for Canadian research. American census records from 1790 onward provide a systematic record of family units and their locations across the United States, allowing researchers to trace the westward movement of Rattray families from their initial Atlantic coastal settlements.

Variant spellings to consider include Rattray, Rattra, Ratraye (in older Scots documents), and — for American records — Ratrey or Rattrey. DNA genealogy is useful for connecting Rattray descendants across continents, particularly autosomal testing through the major genealogy platforms, where the growing size of the tested population makes cousin matching increasingly productive.