The moorland chat was formally described in 1837 by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell from a specimen collected in the Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia.

[3][4] The chat was discovered on Mount Elgon on the Uganda-Kenya border by Frederick Jackson.

The English geographer Halford Mackinder brought back the same bird from Mount Kenya in 1899.

A very curious little bird was found by Mr Jackson on Mount Elgon at a height of 11,000 feet, and I remember saying to Mr. Mackinder that he was bound to find the same sort of little chat on Mount Kenya, at a height of 11,000 feet.

[6][7] The moorland chat was therefore assigned to its own monotypic genus Pinarochroa which had been introduced by the Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1872.