Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 30 on 01/12/2006.

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Everything you need to know about...Tartan

This issue, Roddy Martine reveals the history of tartan

What is so particularly extraordinary about tartan is that it is historically unique to Scotland. Nobody else seems to have come up with the idea.

That said, the sight of Mel Gibson portraying a tartan clad Sir William Wallace in his Hollywood film Braveheart was sheer inventive nonsense. As a 13th century knight, Wallace would have worn chain mail in battle, and besides, he was a Lowlander.

Sorry Mel, but you did get it awfully wrong. The first written reference to striped cloth being worn by the Scots appeared much later in the 16th century. By the 18th century, however, it had certainly evolved as the costume of the Scottish Highlander. In his 1703 Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, Martin Martin, Macleod of Macleod’s Skye-born factor, wrote, “The plaid worn only by men is made of fine wool, the thread as fine as can be made of that kind, it consists of diverse colours and there is a great deal of ingenuity required in sorting the colours, so as to be agreeable to the nicest fancy. For this reason the women are at great pains, first to give an exact pattern of the plaid upon a piece of wood, having the number of every thread of the stripe on it.” All considered, it is remarkable how such a mathematically ingenious formula came to be worked out by those supposedly simple people who manufactured the cloth.

But then the Scots have always been great inventors, and it did not take long for certain colour patterns to be identified with specific districts owing to t.....

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By Roddy Martine

Section : Scottish Clothing

Page number : 74