Every Carstairs family traces its name to one Lanarkshire parish: the barony of Carstairs on the upper Clyde, a few miles east of Lanark.
In September 1684 the Privy Council of Scotland put a minister's thumbs into a screw and tightened it for an hour and a half. When that produced nothing they sent for the boot, an iron casing driven onto the leg with wedges until the bone gave way.
The man in the chair was William Carstares. Thirty years later he would be the most quietly powerful Scot alive, running the Church of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, with the government that broke his hands asking him what to do next.
Not many surnames this size carry a figure like that, and fewer still carry him alongside a Roman fort, a bishop's castle and a railway junction every Scot has heard of.
What Does the Name Carstairs Mean?
Start with what it is not. The version on the tourist boards, that Carstairs comes from Latin castra and means fort land, is folk etymology built backward from the Roman camp nearby. Tidy, memorable and wrong.
The place appears as Casteltarres in 1170. Older surname dictionaries read that as Middle English castel, a castle, plus a personal name Tarra or Tarres of unknown meaning, which at least has the virtue of taking the recorded form seriously.
Current place-name scholarship goes further back. The first element is Brittonic cajr, an enclosed defensible site, the same word as Welsh caer. The second is a lost stream name identical in origin to the Tarras Water in Dumfriesshire, from a Brittonic root tā, melting or thawing, with the river-forming suffix -ar. The final s is a later Scots plural, which is why the name so often loses and regains it in the records.
The fort by the thawing burn, in other words. Brittonic naming in Clydesdale is what you would expect from the old kingdom of Strathclyde, and it puts Carstairs in the same layer as many names in the upper Clyde valley. Our guide to how Scottish surname meanings are established explains why the earliest written form beats the modern one.
How Old Is the Settlement at Carstairs?
Older than the name. At Castledykes, on the escarpment in the parish, the Romans built a fort of about 174 by 160 meters at the end of Agricola's campaigns, roughly AD 80 to 85. It was abandoned within a few years, rebuilt around AD 142 during the Antonine push north, and occupied again into the 150s and 160s with an annex on the north front, possibly for wagons.
Early antiquaries confused the medieval ruins with Roman work, which is where the castra story came from. Our piece on the Roman names for Scotland covers what the legions actually called this country.
The medieval story begins in 1126, when the lands were given to the Bishops of Glasgow. Carstairs Castle was theirs, confirmed by episcopal charters in 1245 and 1294, and between 1286 and 1292 a new castle was begun under license to complete it turreted and crenellated.
It mattered. In 1302, during the Wars of Independence, Carstairs held ten men-at-arms, twenty named soldiers and forty foot, a stronger garrison than Lanark Castle down the road. Nothing survives above ground.
The barony was erected a burgh of barony in 1765, Carstairs House was built in 1821 to 1824 for Henry Monteith, and the Caledonian Railway opened a station in 1848. That junction, where the Edinburgh line leaves the west coast route, is why most Britons know the name.
When Does Carstairs Become a Surname?
In the usual Lowland way and at the usual time. Adam de Castrotharis is on record in 1259, in Lanarkshire, in the reign of Alexander III. Petrus de Castellstaris follows in 1351. By 1536 the preposition and half the syllables have gone and the man is simply Thomas Castaris.
That three-stage collapse, from Latin territorial description to Scots contraction to fixed inherited name, is the life cycle of a Lowland place-name surname compressed into three entries. Neighboring parishes did the same thing, as our history of Cleghorn, a short ride away, shows.
Two consequences follow. Nobody surnamed Carstairs need descend from the barons; tenants and cottars on episcopal land took the name of the ground they worked. And the spelling was never stable, so the variants have to be searched together.
Who Was William Carstares?
Born at Cathcart near Glasgow on 11 February 1649, son of the Reverend John Carstares, a Covenanting minister who lost his charge at the Restoration. He grew up inside the defeated party, which shaped everything after.
He studied at Edinburgh and then Utrecht, and it was in the Netherlands that his real career started. During the Third Anglo-Dutch War he worked as an intelligence agent for the Prince of Orange under the cover name William Williams.
It caught up with him. Arrested on English soil in September 1674, he was held in the Tower of London, moved to Edinburgh Castle in 1675 and not released until August 1679. He took a parish at Theobalds in Hertfordshire in 1681, then went straight back into Whig conspiracy.
In July 1683 he was arrested at Tenterden in Kent over the Rye House Plot, the scheme to ambush and kill Charles II and his brother. He gave the Scottish Privy Council nothing for over a year. In September 1684 they used the thumbikins and then the boot.
He talked. He also secured, through John Drummond, an undertaking that his answers would not be used as evidence in court, remarkable bargaining from a man in that position. He was moved to Stirling Castle and eventually freed. This was the Scotland of the Killing Time, the decade in which the Covenanting cause his father had served was hunted across the southwest; the roots of it are in the National Covenant of 1638.
Why Was He Called Cardinal Carstares?
Because after 1688 he was, in practice, the man who decided Scottish church business.
He sailed with William of Orange to Torbay in 1688 as chaplain, and stayed on as royal chaplain for Scotland and as the king's confidential adviser on Scottish affairs. William did not know Scotland; Carstares did, in detail, including which ministers could be trusted and which could be bought. The nickname was not affectionate. It was a comment on how much a Presbyterian minister could operate like a Roman curial politician.
He used it for a settled Presbyterian church rather than bishops, and for the universities. Elected Principal of the University of Edinburgh in 1703, he replaced the old regenting system, in which one man carried a class through every subject, with the Dutch model of specialist chairs. That reform is a quiet foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment, which needed exactly the specialized teaching he installed.
He was chosen Moderator of the General Assembly four times, in 1705, 1708, 1711 and 1715. And he worked hard for the Union of 1707, on the calculation that a secured Church of Scotland inside the new state was worth more than an exposed one outside it. Whether he was right is still argued over; our account of the Acts of Union sets out what was actually traded.
He died on 28 December 1715 after a stroke and lies in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. He had no children, so the name did not descend from him.
Is Carstairs a Clan?
No, and it never was. There is no chief, no clan structure and no recognized Carstairs tartan, which is the ordinary position for a Lowland territorial surname and no reflection on the history behind it. Scottish heraldry works by grant to a named person and their line, never by surname, so no one crest is the property of everybody called Carstairs.
Lanarkshire is full of names in exactly this position. Some, like the Lockharts of Lee, became recognized clans; most, like Carstairs, simply stayed families.
Where Did the Carstairs Name Travel?
It stayed small. The 1901 Scottish census counted 476 people surnamed Carstairs, ranking it around 1,231st in the country, concentrated in the central belt rather than in the parish itself.
Two bearers are worth knowing. Thomas Carstairs, baptized at Largo in Fife in August 1759, reached Philadelphia and advertised there in February 1784 as an architect and house carpenter. He designed the long block of rowhouses on Sansom Street for William Sansom around 1800, an early and influential piece of American speculative housing, and died in 1830.
The other is George Morrison Carstairs, born in 1916 to a Church of Scotland missionary family in India and raised in Edinburgh from the age of ten. He became Professor of Psychological Medicine at Edinburgh, gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 1962 as This Island Now, and later served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of York.
One modern note, since it surprises people who look the name up. The State Hospital, Scotland's high-security psychiatric facility, stands near Carstairs Junction and is universally called Carstairs. It has no connection to families of the surname.
How Do You Trace a Carstairs Family?
- Search Carstairs, Carstares, Carstaires and Castairs together. The second is the form William Carstares himself used.
- Work backward from a statutory certificate after 1855 before touching the older material, following our guide to Scotland's 1855 civil registration.
- Do not assume the parish. A small territorial name spreads early, and by the eighteenth century Carstairs families are commoner in Fife and Edinburgh than in Lanarkshire.
- For the Lanarkshire ground itself, remember the land was episcopal. Glasgow diocesan and later heritors' records reach into periods that ordinary parish registers do not.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Carstairs Name
Where does the surname Carstairs come from?
From the barony and parish of Carstairs in Lanarkshire, recorded as Casteltarres in 1170. The first bearers on record are Adam de Castrotharis in 1259 and Petrus de Castellstaris in 1351.
Does Carstairs really mean fort land in Latin?
No. That reading comes from the Roman fort at Castledykes and runs backward from the modern spelling. The name is Brittonic, combining cajr, a defended site, with a lost stream name related to the Tarras Water.
Was William Carstares related to the barony?
Not demonstrably. He was born at Cathcart near Glasgow to a minister's family, and like most bearers of a territorial surname he inherited the name rather than the land. He died childless in 1715.
Is the Carstairs surname connected to the State Hospital?
Only by accident of geography. The hospital sits near Carstairs Junction and took the village name, which the village had held for eight centuries beforehand.
Sources and Further Reading
- Carstairs, South Lanarkshire — the Brittonic place-name derivation, the burgh of barony of 1765 and the 1848 railway.
- William Carstares — his life, imprisonments, torture and later career.
- Canmore: Castledykes Roman fort — the national site record, with the Flavian and Antonine phases.
- Canmore: Carstairs Castle — the grant of 1126, the episcopal charters and why nothing survives.
- Surname Database: Carstairs — the early recorded forms of 1259, 1351 and 1536.
- Philadelphia Architects and Buildings: Thomas Carstairs — his Largo baptism, his arrival and the Sansom Street houses.
- Carstairs in the 1901 Scottish census — the surname mapped across Scotland, with its national ranking.
- Scotland's People — statutory registers from 1855, censuses and Old Parish Registers.
Browse our Carstairs Scottish family gifts to explore the available collection.