Clans of The Borders
Scottish Borders
Tweed, Teviot and the riding country, the great age of the reivers.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in The Borders
- Clan CockburnA border clan of jurists and queen's men.
- Clan ElliotOne of the great riding clans of the Borders.
- Clan ScottOf the Borders, Buccleuch, Walter Scott, and the Antarctic.
- ReidThe red one, descriptive Scots surname, dense in the Lothians and the Borders.
- WatsonSon of Wat, the Lowland patronymic that produced both the steam engine and Sherlock Holmes's friend.
- YoungDescriptive, the younger, sister surname to Vaughan in Wales and Óg in Ireland.
- Clan ArmstrongStrong-of-arm, the most feared of the Border riding clans.
- Clan GrahamOf Grægham, the Anglo-Norman knight who became one of Scotland's great houses.
- Clan KerrLate but in earnest, riding clan of the Roxburgh marches.
Historic ties to The Borders
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in The Borders.
- Sir Walter ScottThe Edinburgh advocate who invented the historical novel, recovered the lost Honours of Scotland for the nation, and cleared a fortune in debt as a point of honour.
- Sir James MurrayThe Hawick draper's son who taught himself twenty-five languages by twenty and built the Oxford English Dictionary from a tin shed in his garden.
- Andrew CunninghamThe Mediterranean Fleet admiral whose night action at Cape Matapan and dogged evacuation of Crete saved the Mediterranean for the Royal Navy in 1941.
- Neil ArmstrongThe Wapakoneta boy of Border-Scots ancestry who flew his first aeroplane at fifteen and stepped onto the Moon at thirty-eight.
- Henry, Lord CockburnThe Edinburgh judge who was the leading Whig advocate at the Scottish bar through a long Tory generation, drafted the Scottish Reform Act, and wrote Memorials of His Time, the foundational personal record of late-Georgian and early-Victorian Edinburgh.
- Sir John MalcolmThe Eskdale tenant farmer's son who sailed for India at twelve, led three British diplomatic missions to the Qajar court at Tehran, governed Bombay, and wrote the History of Persia that was the standard English reference for a century.
- Angus TaylorThe Goulburn sheep-farmer's son who took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, ran McKinsey's Sydney office, won the Liberal seat of Hume in 2013, served as Australia's Minister for Energy, and is the Liberal shadow Treasurer.
- Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of MintoThe Edinburgh-born Borders Whig who as Viceroy of Corsica (1794 to 1796) governed the only British constitutional kingdom in the Mediterranean, and as Governor-General of India (1807 to 1813) opened the British relationship with the Punjab and won the Mauritius and Java campaigns.
Stories told here
Legends set in The Borders, from any family that carries them.