Flag of Scotland

How to read it

The Flag Institute calls the Saltire, or St Andrew’s Cross, the national flag of Scotland, one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and says it has a basis in Scots law: in 1672 the Lord Lyon, Scotland’s heraldic authority, recorded it in the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland as “Azur a cross of St Andrew Argent, for Scotland”. The Institute dates the saltire as a Scottish emblem to the seal of the Guardians of Scotland in 1286. In 1385 an order told every Scottish soldier to wear one, and the first certain picture of a white St Andrew’s cross on a blue field is in the armorial of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, about 1542. The background was not fixed at first. W. G. Perrin, in British Flags (1922), notes that under the 1385 order a man in a white coat wore his white cross on black cloth, and that the Scottish treasurer’s accounts show blue banners with St Andrew’s cross in 1512 but red and yellow ones in 1540 and 1542. The Flag Institute gives the proportions as 3:5 and the blue as Pantone 300. The saltire is one of heraldry’s ordinaries; the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as the cross on which St Andrew suffered, borne for that reason on the banner of Scotland.

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The shade of blue

No official shade has been decided. A Flag Code drawn up by the Heraldry Society of Scotland with the Saltire Society and the Scottish Flag Trust says the field should be blue “of a hue compatible with Pantone 300 (unglazed)” and the flag 4 units high by 5 long. The Scottish Flag Trust says the Scottish Parliament accepted the code as general guidance, though it has no legal status. The UK Parliament’s petitions committee put it more narrowly when it turned down a petition about the Union Flag’s blue in the 2017–19 Parliament: the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Culture and Sport Committee made a recommendation about the colour, but the Parliament as a whole has not decided on an official blue.

Scotland’s blue is lighter than the blue of the Union Flag, which the Flag Institute specifies as Pantone 280.

St Andrew and the battle of Athelstaneford

The Scottish Flag Trust gives two traditions for the colours. In one, Andrew, the first disciple Christ called, was crucified at Patras in Greece on a diagonal cross, perhaps because he felt unworthy to die on a cross like his Lord’s, and he wore blue, so the white wood against his blue robes gave the flag its colours. In the other, a Pictish army under King Angus, surrounded by a larger force of Saxons under Athelstan near Athelstaneford in East Lothian, saw a white saltire against the blue sky; Angus vowed that Andrew would be Scotland’s patron saint if they won, and they did. The Trust says every early Scottish historian, Boece, Bower and Buchanan among them, records the battle, and it takes 832 as the most likely date; others give 800, 815 or between 820 and 834. Perrin quotes the historian W. F. Skene for the older record: Angus son of Fergus founded a church at St Andrews in the 8th century with clergy who brought relics of the saint, and Andrew replaced St Peter as patron of the kingdom.

Who flies it

In Scots Heraldry (1956) the Lord Lyon wrote that St Andrew’s cross is the flag any Scot is entitled to fly or wear to show national identity, and the proper flag for a Scottish church, the Scottish Flag Trust records. The Scottish Government’s 2026 guidance flies the Saltire every day from St Andrew’s House, its principal building, and says that where a building has two or more flagpoles the Saltire should be one of the flags. On St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, the Royal Banner may fly there above the Saltire, by royal assent.