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Dalton came to Ireland with the Anglo-Normans and gave its name to Dalton’s country, the Westmeath barony of Rathconrath. These gifts set the Dalton family crest on the Irish National Tartan, from a fringed cotton woven blanket to a framed Christmas ornament.
Dalton, written Daltún or Dalatún in Irish, arrived with the Anglo-Normans as de Daltune and is spelled both Dalton and D’Alton today. Rev. Patrick Woulfe reads it as “of Dalton,” a common place-name in the north of England, with “de Aletone,” of Alton, as a second possibility. The family’s full story, from the Dublin guild roll to the Westmeath midlands, is told in our Dalton Irish surname history.
Robert and William de Daltune were enrolled as merchants of the Dublin guild in 1226. The family then took root in the west of Meath, and when the Crown carved out the new shire of Westmeath in 1543, the district known as Dalton’s country became the barony of Rathconrath, Ráth Conarta in Irish, from ráth, a ring-fort. The Daltons held Rathconrath until the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations stripped them of their estates. Their name stayed on the land: in 1784 Count Richard D’Alton came home from a career in Austrian service and built Mount Dalton House beside Mount Dalton Lough in the townland of Loughan. Westmeath also gave the name the historian John D’Alton, born at Bessville in 1792, who compiled King James’s Irish Army List, 1689.
Start with the heirloom: a cotton blanket woven with the Dalton crest over the Irish National Tartan, fringed at the ends and sized from armchair to bed. Beside it sit a lighter printed throw for the couch, a black-handled 11oz mug for the morning, a House of Dalton flag for the porch and a silver-framed ornament for the tree. Any of them marks a family reunion, a wedding, a first home or a trip back to Westmeath.
