Clan Keith: History, Castles, Motto & Tartan

The Keiths held one of the most powerful offices in Scotland for over five hundred years. As hereditary Great Marischals, they were the guardians of the Scottish crown, sceptre, and sword of state, and they were personally responsible for the king's safety in Parliament. They built their legacy on Aberdeenshire cliff tops, Caithness coastlines, and one extraordinary act of defiance against Oliver Cromwell, the English military leader who overthrew and executed the king of England in 1649 and then turned his army north to bring Scotland under his control.

We tell it a little differently here. As well as the history, you'll find landscape photography from across Keith territory woven through the story, because these places are as much a part of the clan's legacy as the people who lived in them. By the end, we hope your imagination has a few more images to draw on when you think about where your ancestors came from.

Where did Clan Keith originate?

The Keith name comes from the lands of Keith in East Lothian, in the south of Scotland just east of Edinburgh. Tradition traces the family to the Chatti, a Germanic tribe, and to one warrior in particular who is said to have killed the Danish general Camus at the Battle of Barrie in 1010. For this, Malcolm II is said to have drawn three bloodied fingers down the warrior's shield. Those three red stripes became the Keith arms, and you can still see them on the seal of Sir Robert de Keth from 1316.

Whether the Chatti legend is literally true is another matter. What is certain is that the Keiths held land in East Lothian from an early date, and that around 1150 a Norman called Hervey married the Keith heiress and received a charter for those lands from David I. By 1176, Hervey's son was styled "Marischal of the King of Scots" in royal charters. The Marischal was responsible for the safety of the king's person within Parliament and was custodian of the royal regalia. It was a position of enormous trust, and the Keiths would hold it as a hereditary right for the next five centuries.

The moment that changed everything for the Keiths was Bannockburn in 1314, the battle where Robert the Bruce defeated the English army and secured Scotland's independence. Sir Robert de Keith led the cavalry that day, around 500 horsemen, and it was his charge that scattered the English archers and turned the tide. When the battle was won and the English were fleeing, Keith's horsemen gave chase, trying to capture the English king before he could escape across the border. They didn't manage it, but it didn't matter. Bruce rewarded the family with the royal forest of Halforest in Aberdeenshire, where they built their first major castle outside East Lothian, and in 1324 he made the Marischal office hereditary. From that point on, if you were a Keith, you were born into one of the most powerful roles in Scotland.

Over the next century, the Keiths used that position to build a web of influence across the northeast. The key was land, and the way you got land in medieval Scotland was marriage. Sir William Keith married the Fraser heiress and overnight the family's holdings doubled, stretching across Buchan, Kincardine, and Lothian. His brother John married into the Cheyne family, bringing the Inverugie estate near Peterhead, which would become the family's main seat for generations. By the early 1400s, Keith children were marrying into the royal family and into the Gordons, the other great power in the northeast. Land, titles, alliances: it all ran through marriage in medieval Scotland, and the Keiths played it as well as anyone.

Dunnottar Castle and the Honours of Scotland

In 1382, the Keiths exchanged their property of Struthers in Fife with the Lindsays for Dunnottar Castle, and in doing so acquired one of the most dramatic fortifications in Scotland. Dunnottar sits on a rocky headland two miles south of Stonehaven, surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs dropping into the North Sea. For the next three centuries, it served as the chief stronghold of the Keith Earls Marischal.

In 1458, the Keiths became Earls Marischal, one of Scotland's great earldoms. And they did something with it. The fifth Earl, George Keith, was said to be the richest nobleman in Scotland, and he used that wealth to found Marischal College in Aberdeen in 1593: a university that shaped Scottish education for centuries. He also led the diplomatic mission to Denmark that arranged the Scottish king's marriage to a Danish princess. The Danish king was so pleased he sent a shipload of timber as a thank-you, and George used it to build Keith Marischal, the family's tower house back in their ancestral homeland of East Lothian.

Dunnottar's greatest moment came in 1651. England had just been through a civil war. Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, had overthrown and executed King Charles I, and now Cromwell turned his attention to Scotland, which had recognised Charles's son as king. His army marched north to bring the Scots to heel. The Honours of Scotland, the crown, sceptre, and sword of state, needed to be hidden somewhere Cromwell's forces couldn't reach them. They were brought to Dunnottar.

The seventh Earl Marischal was captured and locked in the Tower of London, but his brother Sir John Keith held the castle against a siege that lasted eight months. When it became clear the walls would eventually fall, the regalia had to be smuggled out. The most famous version of the story has a local woman from Kinneff walking into the castle on the pretence of visiting the governor's wife, then walking back out past the English soldiers with the Scottish crown jewels hidden in bundles of linen and flax (a plant fibre used for making cloth). She carried them to Kinneff Church, a few miles down the coast, where the minister buried them beneath the floor. They stayed there, hidden under the flagstones of a country church, until the monarchy was restored years later. For saving them, Sir John was given the title Earl of Kintore and something almost no one else in Scotland has ever received: the royal crown, sword, and sceptre added to his own coat of arms.

More Keith Castles

Back in East Lothian, Keith Marischal still stands three miles south of Pencaitland. This is where it all started, the ancestral heartland that gave the family its name. The property carries a dark story: Agnes Simpson, accused of witchcraft by James VI, of using sorcery to raise a storm and drown the king at sea, lived at Keith Marischal before her trial and execution.

Across Aberdeenshire, the Keiths were everywhere. Keith Hall near Inverurie became the seat of the Earls of Kintore, the branch descended from Sir John who saved the crown jewels, and the Kintore family still lives on that estate today. Boddam Castle near Peterhead was held by a Keith branch who eventually sent one of their own across the Atlantic: Sir William Keith became Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania in the 18th century. If you're a Keith in the US, there's a chance your family's connection to Scotland runs through that Aberdeenshire coastline.

The Keith-Gunn Feud

The Keiths' northernmost stronghold was Ackergill Tower in Caithness, two miles north of Wick, which they acquired from the Cheynes around 1350 and held for over 260 years. It was from Ackergill that one of Scotland's longest and most bitter clan feuds played out.

Not every Keith story reflects well on the family. The traditional account holds that Dugald Keith abducted Helen Gunn, known in Gaelic tradition as the Beauty of Braemore, and brought her to Ackergill by force. Rather than submit, she threw herself from the tower. What followed was one of the longest feuds in Scottish clan history, stretching across nearly two centuries. The Gunns raided Keith lands in retaliation. The two clans clashed at Tannach Moor in 1438 and again at Dirlot in 1464. In 1478, the Keiths offered to meet the Gunns at a chapel to settle things peacefully, but when the Gunns arrived they found the Keiths had brought twice the agreed number of men. The Gunn chief was killed. His son reportedly took his own revenge years later, killing Keith of Ackergill and his son at Drummoy in 1518. The violence carried on, generation after generation, until the castle was eventually sold to the Sinclairs in 1612.

Aberdeenshire: Keith Country

Beyond the major strongholds, the Keiths held dozens of smaller properties concentrated in the northeast of Scotland. The lands around Peterhead, Inverugie, and the Buchan coast were dense with Keith tower houses, and the family's influence extended south to the Mearns and west into Deeside, where they held Aboyne Castle from 1335. Aboyne eventually passed to the Gordons by the early 15th century, but for a time it was part of that expanding Keith footprint across the northeast. It is in this Aberdeenshire landscape, between granite farmland and river valleys, that the Keith story is most deeply rooted.

The Jacobites and the End of the Marischals

After the Stuarts lost the British throne in 1688, a movement grew to restore them. These were the Jacobites, and the Keiths were among them. The tenth Earl Marischal and his brother James joined the 1715 Rising, backing the exiled Stuart king against the new government in London. It failed. The brothers lost everything: their lands, their castles, their titles. Dunnottar was partly destroyed in 1716 and further demolished two years later. Five centuries of Keith power in Scotland, gone.

But the brothers themselves were far from finished. Exiled and with nothing left in Scotland, they reinvented themselves across Europe. James Keith had one of the most remarkable military careers of the age. He fought for Spain, then joined the Russian army under Peter the Great, rising to general in wars against the Turks and the Swedes. Eventually Frederick the Great recruited him to Prussia, where he became a Field Marshal and Governor of Berlin. When he was killed in battle at Hochkirch in 1758, Frederick raised a statue to him in the Prussian capital. A Keith from Aberdeenshire, honoured by a king in Berlin.

What is the Keith clan motto and crest?

The Keith motto, Veritas Vincit ("Truth Conquers"), suits a family whose power rested on one of the most trusted offices in the realm. The Keith crest features a roebuck's head issuing from a crest coronet, and the Kintore branch also carries a second crest: a noble lady holding a garland of laurel, granted in recognition of the office of Marischal. The Keith plant badge is the white rose.

Clan Crest Roebuck's head with Veritas Vincit

Clan Tartan The Keith tartan: black, blue, and green with a red overcheck.

The Keith tartan is registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans, and its mix of black, blue, green, and red sits well against the granite and green of the Aberdeenshire landscape. The Keith arms, with their three red stripes on a white chief, are said to derive from the bloody fingermarks Malcolm II drew on the shield of the warrior who slew Camus. The coat of arms also bears the royal crown, sceptre, and sword, added after the rescue of the Honours of Scotland. Few families carry anything like it.

Does Clan Keith exist today?

The Keith surname has spread far beyond Scotland's northeast. Keiths settled across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and the name carries particularly well because it works as both a first name and a surname in the English-speaking world. Clan Keith USA and Clan Keith societies in Australia and New Zealand keep the connection to the northeast alive.

If you've been reading this as someone with Keith ancestors, we hope it's helped fill in a few more details of your family's story. We also hope the photography has given your imagination something to work with, because these places are still standing, and they look much as they did when the Keiths were there. This was a family whose word was trusted with the crown jewels of a nation, who fought on the winning side at Bannockburn, who founded a university, and who, when Scotland needed them most, held the line at Dunnottar until the Honours were safe. That's your name, and that's your story.