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Wigtownshire, Scotland

image by Tomislav Todorovic, 6 September 2026

Description of the flag

Description of the flag

From https://britishcountyflags.com/2016/11/06/a-flag-for-wigtownshire/:

"The proposed flag for Wigtownshire is taken from the arms used by the former Wigtownshire County Council, where the design appears as a “chief”, the top section of the shield. This in turn was based upon the arms of the Dalrymple lords of Stair, who owned significant territory in the county. While all modern illustrations of the Wigtownshire County Council arms unequivocally display the saltire as black it seems plausible that this may have arisen from a mistaken understanding of original line drawings, where colours were indicated by “hatching”, that is a series of specific strokes of a pencil etc. to represent colours, when materials to depict those colours were not available. An intended navy blue colour may have been misinterpreted as black. Notwithstanding this possibly erroneous origin however, the dramatic and unique Wigtownshire arrangement of black and gold, saltire and diamonds makes a fine flag for the county.

Jason Saber, 24 October 2018

The reason for this supposition is that the Dalrymple arms are Or, on a saltire Azure nine lozenges of the first, where the arms used by the Wigtownshire County Council use sable, rather than azure.
Peter Hans van den Muijzenberg, 25 February 2019

The black and gold proposed flag was derived from the erroneous depictions of the arms of Wigtownshire County Council, where an unusually dark shade of blue was used and mis-interpreted as black, eventually being replaced with the latter color [1]. Since the blazon of the Council arms definitely specifies the tincture azure, not sable [2] and there is no danger to mistake the proposed flag for any other - namely, the Dalrymple family banner of arms, which would display the same charges with reversed colors [1, 2, 3] - there is no need to maintain the error in the flag design, so the British County Flags website team recently decided to revise the proposed flag by replacing the erroneous black color with the correct blue [3].

Sources:

[1] British County Flags website - Wigtownshire (saved at the Internet
Archive on 2019-07-16):
https://britishcountyflags.com/2016/11/06/a-flag-for-wigtownshire

[2] Heraldry of the World website - Wigtownshire:
https://www.heraldry-wiki.com/wiki/Wigtownshire

[3] British County Flags website - Wigtownshire (current content):
https://britishcountyflags.com/2016/11/06/a-flag-for-wigtownshire

Tomislav Todorovic, 6 September 2026