My visit to Ireland in 2025 reawaked my interest in my family background in Ireland. There is in fact a published history of the family (sadly out of print), and in that book there is an illustration of the Wall coat of arms.

The same coat of arms appears on a number of other websites, for example irishsurnames.com and House of Names, so I have used the excellent DrawShield heraldry creation tools to create an SVG image of that coat of arms from the textual description (see below).

At this point I need to acknowledge that there’s something absurdly patriarchal about focussing on the male line of my ancestry – the people from whom I derive my surname. But of all my ancestors, this is the line that is best documented, and probably the only one with a recognised coat of arms that I might plausibly claim as my own.

The Wall family arrived in Ireland in about 1170 as part of the Anglo-Norman (or Cambro-Norman) invasion. It’s impossible to trace my ancestry directly back to those original Walls, but it seems likely that my surname comes from those individuals, giving a tenuous validity to my claim of the coat of arms.

For anyone concerned that the Norman origins of my ancestors means that my Irish great-grandparents might not be considered to be genuinely Irish, I would note that almost all people of European ancestry are the product of multiple invasions over the centuries – even the Celts of pre-Norman Ireland are thought to have displaced the more ancient population that created neolithic monuments like Newgrange.

In heraldry, the formal description of a coat of arms is called a blazon. The blazon for the Wall coat of arms is:

DrawShield does a very good job of generating a shield from this blazon, but I tweaked the input a little and then edited the output SVG file to get the desired result. The SVG file is available to download by clicking on the shield above.