Clan Fraser

The Clan Fraser Society dates the earliest written record of the name to 1160, when Simon Fraser held lands at Keith in East Lothian and gave a church to Kelso Abbey. Over the next two centuries the family moved north through Tweeddale and settled in several counties, so that by the fourteenth century there were two groups of northern Frasers, one in Aberdeenshire and one in Inverness-shire.

The society names Sir Simon Fraser, executed in 1306 after supporting Wallace and Bruce, as a common ancestor of the Highland and Lowland lines, though not a chief of either in the later sense. The Inverness-shire Frasers, it says, built their position around the Beauly estuary by marriage and diplomacy rather than conquest, taking lands in Strathfarrar, Strathglass and Stratherrick. Traditional Fraser country, in the society's account, reached from the west end of Loch Monar to Inverness and along the south side of Loch Ness to Fort Augustus.

The society dates the peerage title Lord Lovat to around 1460, and says Beaufort Castle, then called Castle Dounie, passed to the family only in 1511. Before that the seat was Lovat Keep, whose exact site the society says is unknown, though it is thought to lie across the river from the later sites. Wikipedia reports a Fraser victory over Clan Donald at Mamsha in 1429, a date this site has not traced to a printed history. The society records the Battle of the Shirts in 1544, in which the 3rd Lord Lovat died.

The Black Watch Museum names Simon, Lord Lovat, among the commanders of the independent Highland companies authorised by the warrant of 1725. He is the same Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, whom the society says was executed for treason in London in 1747 after the Jacobite rising. The society says Castle Dounie was razed after Culloden in 1746 and that about 250 Frasers died in the battle under the Master of Lovat. Wikipedia says the estates were forfeited and recovered in 1774.

The present Beaufort Castle, a Victorian sandstone building, replaced Castle Dounie. In the twentieth century the society records chiefs of the family in the Lovat Scouts, at Gallipoli in 1915 and in commando service in 1944. It names the current chief as Simon Fraser, born in 1977, who took over the Lovat estates' management in 2018. Ordinal numbering of recent Lords Lovat differs between sources and is not given here.

The Scottish Register of Tartans lists Fraser of Lovat as a clan or family tartan dated 1893, taken from D.W. Stewart's Old and Rare Scottish Tartans, with a sample in the Scottish Tartans Society's Scarlett Collection. The Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling holds a Wilson of Bannockburn Fraser piece from the early nineteenth century. The museum record gives no threadcount, so it cannot be compared with the 1893 sett.

The clan society notes that the Sobieski Stewarts, whose 1842 Vestiarium Scoticum the register says added spurious documentation to the subject of tartan, worked on Eilean Aigas, an island on Fraser land. That is a local connection to the book, not evidence about any Fraser sett. No source read for this page ties Lord Lovat to the choice of the Black Watch tartan, and this site makes no such claim.

The Fraser surname page is at /surnames/fraser/. The link to the clan is rated probable, with a split that matters: the society says only the Frasers of Lovat belong to the Highland clan, and the Frasers of Philorth in Aberdeenshire, now Lords Saltoun, share an ancestor but are a separate Lowland family. A person named Fraser may belong to either or to neither, so the surname alone does not select the Lovat tartan. No sept list is recorded here.