by John Prebble
(He) called out to me, Hold your hand, I’m a Campbell. On which I asked him, where’s your Bonnet? He reply’d Somebody hath snatched it off my Head. I only mention this to show how we distinguished our loyal clans from the Rebels; they being dress‘d and equipp’d all in one way, except the bonnet; ours having a Red or Yellow Cross of Cloth or Ribbon; theirs a White Cockade.
But fiction that serves a romantic yearning can easily replace a
mundane truth. Even Neil Munro, who should perhaps have known
better, believed the myth and used it dramatically. When John Splendid and young Elrigmore were fleeing from the defeat of their clan at Inverlochy they knocked at the door of a cottage in Glencoe, and asked a blind woman to shelter them for the night. They thought it wise to encourage her belief that they were friendly Appin Stewarts, but she discovered her mistake when she passed a corner of John Splendid’s plaid through her fingers.
Her face dyed crimson; she drew back her stool a little, and cried out –“That’s not off a Stewart web, it was never waulked in Appin.”
The Highlanders’love of tartan, the “princely cloth” extolled by Duncan Ban, was nonetheless deep and intense, as was their bitterness when the Proscription Act of 1746 forced them to darken its rich colours in vats of mud, and make breeches of their plaids. That love sustained the pride of the young men who volunteered or were pressed into the King’s Highland regiments. They mutinied, and sometimes died, rather than be transferred to a Lowland battalion where they would no longer wear kilt and plaid. When the Act was repealed in 1782, Duncan Ban composed a song of praise. “Now we are free to dress as we please … a belted kilt in pleats … checked and red-hued …” But few of the common people returned to their old costume. The clan system, of which it had once been a proud manifestation, was now broken. Old skills were lost in death, and new generations had become accustomed since boyhood to what Duncan Ban called an droch fhasan, the evil fashion of the Lowlander. Perhaps there was also a prideful hurt, a dignified refusal to put on their ancient dress now that an insulting mockery of it was being worn by chiefs who had abandoned them for a’chaorach mhor, the great, white-face from the Cheviot Hills.
On the Stirling plain and in the Border towns, weaving firms did well during the long Napoleonic wars, making uniform cloth and plaiding for tens of thousands of Highland soldiers. Peace ended these profitable contracts, but when Alasdair Ranaldson’s parti-coloured harlequins came to Edinburgh, wearing tartan they said was exclusive to their name, the weavers quickly responded to the interest it excited throughout Britain and Europe, and in the Americas where plantation-owners wanted a durable and colourful cloth for their slaves. During the first decade of the 19th century the weavers’pattern-books had contained eight or a dozen setts only, identified by a predominant colour or by the name of a Highland district. Twenty years later the number had increased tenfold, and almost all were now presented as tartans of the clans.
Not surprisingly, many of them had an inspirational origin in the tartans worn by the sixty-five marching and fencible regiments raised in the Highlands during the French wars, and these were largely based upon the dark blue and green sett of the Government Tartan, first worn in 1740 by the 43rd Regiment, Black Watch. Other regiments adapted this by the addition of white, yellow or scarlet threads, and from these and other variations in colour and sett have come many of the clan patterns of today. When the 74th Argyll Highlanders were raised in 1778 they wore the Government sett crossed with yellow and white stripes, and Clan Campbell thus acquired its principal tartan. The Mackenzie tartan is also the Black Watch sett, with red and white stripes, and first worn by the 78th Seaforth Highlanders in 1778. In 1793, a manufacturer in Huntly was asked to supply plaiding for a regiment of Fencibles then being raised by the Duke of Gordon. He submitted three patterns, and the Duke chose the Government’s black sett with a yellow stripe, giving future generations of his name something they could believe was the ancient tartan of their clan. Some patterns are more fortuitous in their military origin. When the fourth Duke of Atholl, chief of Clan Murray, raised a marching-regiment in 1778 its uniform clothing became the responsibility of its first-major, Hew Dalrymple. Rummaging through the Duke’s closets at Blair Castle in search of a tartan that might be worn by the battalion drummers, he found one he thought was “very pretty, it has no black in it, but is composed of red, green and dark blue.” No one told the Major, not the Duke and not the Duke’s uncle who was lieutenant-colonel of the regiment, that what he had found was of course the ancient tartan of Clann Mhoraidh, but that is what it has since become.
By the year of the King’s visit this order of precedence had been reversed, and it was now believed that the chiefs who raised these regiments had naturally clothed them in their own ancient tartans. The Black Watch is the only popular sett which pre-dates Culloden, and there is no contemporary evidence of its origin beyond an instruction from the Commander-in-Chief in Scotland, the road-building Anglo-Irishman George Wade, that “the plaid of each company to be as near as they can be of the same sort and colour.” By 1822, however, Campbells believed it to be their tartan because many of the companies had been captained by men of their name, and the Munros maintained it was theirs because the regiment’s first lieutenant-colonel was Sir Robert Munro of Foulis.
When James Logan published his Scottish Gael in 1831 a belief in clan tartans was so well established that he felt no obligation to justify it. His book included a pattern-table of fifty-three setts, “as many specimens as I could procure and authenticate.” Despite his wide travels in the Highlands in search of information, most of these tartans were perhaps procured from Lowland weavers, and as for authentication, at least one of his advisers had been a member of the Society of True Highlanders. After the Queen made her first visit to the Highlands, Logan wrote another book, in collaboration with Robert McIan, a talented artist who shared his taste for whisky if not for quarrelsome dispute. Their Clans of the Scottish Highlands was dedicated “to Her Excellent Majesty who has graciously deigned to visit the country of the Clans and patronised their manufactures and costume.” Although its introduction said that “accurate data will be furnished on the clan tartans” there was none in Logan’s text, but McIan illustrated it with seventy-four splendidly coloured plates of Highlanders, each representative of a clan and each wearing tartan of a distinctive sett. Many of these plates may now be seen on the walls of Highland hotels, notably and perhaps properly at Lairg where the northern wasteland of Sutherland begins, and when they are still bound in their original form they may be bought from antiquarian booksellers for two thousand pounds.
Logan’s preface obliquely acknowledged his indebtedness to “the recent splendid work” of another partnership, two charismatic brothers who called themselves Charles Edward and John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart. They were in fact the sons of a naval lieutenant, Thomas Allen, but appearing in Scottish society a few years after Waterloo, where they said they had fought for Napoleon, they persuaded some of its more susceptible members that their father was the legitimate son of the Young Pretender. Why that drunken and embittered exile had not acknowledged the existence of his heir was never satisfactorily explained, except by the brothers’ magnanimous refusal to press their claim to the throne of Britain. Until their fashionable patrons tired of them they lived under the protection of the chief of Clan Fraser, on a timbered island in a gorge of the River Beauly where they were known as “the Princes” and where, they said, “the sun of our life rose to its meridian.” Their prolific writings on the dress, arms, and traditions of the Highlands showed wide scholarship and sympathetic understanding. They wisely saw that the national costume of a dispersed people could not be restored by the “sumptuary vanity and personal caprice” of charlatans like Alasdair Ranaldson, although they never referred to him as such, being frequently his honoured guests. On the matter of clan tartans, however, they were either the victims or the originators of a forgery as bold as their claim to be descended from th
e most disastrous of Scotland’s romantic heroes.
Their Vestiarium Scoticum, in which this deception was lavishly presented, was published in 1842, a limited edition in imperial quarto, impressively bound in red leather. The substance of it was already known in Scottish literary and historical circles, for the brothers had been writing and talking about it for more than a decade, and Scott had dismissed its evidence for the validity of clan tartans as spurious and absurd. It was allegedly drawn from a 16th-century manuscript “formerly in the Library of the Scots College at Douay” and later in the possession of the Young Pretender, from whom it had passed to the brothers as his inheritors. John Telfer Dunbar has convincingly argued*that belief in the authenticity of this manuscript and its inheritance was essential to the Sobieski Stuarts’romantic pretensions. If it did not exist they could not have inherited it, and knowledge of that deceit would have aroused doubt about the honesty of their claim to royal descent. But if one were accepted on trust, so might be the other. For this reason, perhaps, no one was allowed to see the manuscript, although John described the appearance of its vellum pages in persuasive detail. He did produce what he said was an early 18th-century version of it, and based upon this, the original, or upon patterns obtained from Lowland weavers, the Vestiarium contained seventy-five plates of “the terteinis apperteinand unto ye chieff Hieland clannes.” No one appears to have asked why, if clan tartans were once an important part of Highland life, and almost within living memory, the only documentary evidence of them was a 18th-century copy of a manuscript written two centuries earlier.
The Douay manuscript was never produced or found, but at the end of the 19th century, after the brothers were dead, the transcript was re-discovered. It was subjected to critical examination and declared to be suspect at best, and at worst an inexpert forgery. By this time, however, the use which Logan, McIan and many others had made of the Vestiarium, helped by the enterprising energy of the weaving trade, had long since turned fiction into stubborn truth.
When I see red, green and blue folds of tartan moving in the wind outside a clothier’s shop in Inveraray, I am as susceptible as others to its barbaric charm. It would be pleasing to remember John Ford’s advice and print the legend, if only it correctly reflected the spirit of history. But I cannot forget what was truly happening in the Highlands when the chiefs and lairds, their inheritors and their shooting-guests, were placing orders with Mr McDougall in Inverness or Messrs Wilson in Bannockburn. And I know that I have been right when I have said that instead of being an enduring legacy of the old Gaelic society of the mountains, clan tartans are its shroud.
Chapter 5
On the northern shore of Loch Leven in Lochaber, one hundred and sixty-nine years ago, William Daniell drew the preliminary sketches for his Engraving No. 104, a view of Glen-coe taken near Ballachulish. He always worked quickly, for the task upon which he was engaged was monumental, and he was perhaps long gone before the evening shadow of Sgorr Dearg darkened the bright grass of the MacDonalds’burial isle. The aquatint he published five years later is a scene that comes often to my mind when I speak of Glencoe. I have sometimes stood where he made his drawings, on the flat peninsula of Carness and looking south-east by east to the mouth of the glen. This green spit of land was the old ferry-point and here on the first Monday of February, 1692, two companies of the Earl of Argyll’s regiment crossed the narrows of the loch and marched upon Maclain’s people. In red coats and yellow hose, their uplifted pikes like a moving hedge of thorn, they were closer in time to William Daniell than we are to him. Thus may our thoughts leap-frog through history and make the past seem yesterday.
Unlike others who have put this valley on paper or canvas, Daniell did not feel obliged to convey the horror of the winter night that made it the best known of all Highland glens. It was late summer when he came to Carness, on a tranquil afternoon of rain-washed sunlight, I am sure. The broken cone of Stob Coire is clean and clear against an egg-shell sky, and the low braes are warm with the cinnamon hue of rock and heather. This was a time before the Clearances emptied Loch Levenside, and the aquatint is busy with commonplace life. A southerly wind unravels a tangle of smoke where seaweed is burning. Four fishing-boats, high at stem and stern, are drawn up ashore, and three more are pulling across the choppy water. Six sea-going ships move through the loch on a flood tide, making for the distant walls of the slate-quarry which Daniell may have wished us to believe are the grey turrets of a ruined castle. From Carness today, looking across the now deserted loch, only the towering upthrust of mountains remains unchanged, the scarred flank of Aonach Dubh and the skirt of Meall Mor. But when herring-gulls wheel above the water on black-tipped wings, writing Daniell’s unmistakable signature, I can also see what he saw – the red plaids of two men beside the boats, an inshore oarsman bending before his passenger, the bare masts of ships moored beyond the point, and the sun-pink sails of a heeling ketch, tacking toward the pier at Laroch.
Daniell was unique among the artists who painted the Highlands in the last century, and despite the contrived composition of some of his scenes they remain unequalled in honesty and charm. He was the son and grandson of Surrey innkeepers, and learnt his craft from his uncle Thomas who took him to India as his young assistant in 1785. The skills he acquired then were brilliantly exercised in his aquatints of the Highlands, faithful detail, evocative perspectives, the telling contrast of light and shadow. Unlike the work he did in Bengal and Oudh, their colours are delicately muted, brushed on the paper by girls who worked to his direction and were paid a few pence only for each enduring print. Daniell was forty-five when he began the eight volumes of his Voyage round Great Britain, and the physical strain he put upon himself would have exhausted a much younger man. At the same age, with all the comfortable advantages of modern transport and accommodation, I began my own travelling researches in the Highlands and was often tired by them. Two-thirds of the 308 illustrations in Daniell’s work are of the islands and mountain coastline of western Scotland, and the sketches for most of them were drawn between May and October of one year, 1815. It was, however, an unnatural summer of continuing fine weather. Nowhere in his work are smoking mists or sheeting rain, and only occasionally the shafts of cloud-breaking sunlight that give the Highlands their moods of introspective despair. If I regret this it is because my sometimes melancholy nature is most content in such weather.
It was Daniell’s original intention to observe the title of his work and travel by sea only. This became impossible in the time he set himself and he covered many painful miles by rough hill-tracks and lochside roads. With only a few exceptions, however, all of his aquatints include the grey-water waves of sea-loch and ocean. Like McIan’s plates, many of them are now displayed in Highland hotels, properly enclosed in the black and gilded border designed by Daniell’s friend, the London frame-maker Hogarth. At Sligachan on Skye, below the jagged teeth of Sgurr nan Gillean, there was once and may still be the largest collection I have ever seen, on the walls of the hotel lounge and best studied in idle leisure above the rim of a glass of Talisker.
There is no longer a ferry at Ballachulish, not at Carness nor half a mile westward at Caolas Mhic Phadruig, its more recent point and so named for the young Hebridean raider who was drowned here before the MacDonalds came to Glencoe five hundred years ago. Since 1975, Loch Leven has been crossed by an iron bridge of angular girders that was at first an affront to my eye. Time has made it familiar and from a distance, from Invercoe or Onich when it is pearl-grey or sea-green according to the light, it is only a neat stitch across the water. No more offensive, perhaps, than the wide-beamed car-ferry which once rode the tide on a crescent of foam, clanging its successful arrival against the high rock of Sgorr Dearg. The roads from Oban, Glasgow and Fort William meet here at the narrows, and waiting for the ferry was sometimes a strain upon impatient natures. The time was best employed in computation – the number of assembled vehicles divided by each ferry-load and multiplied by the minutes needed fo
r every crossing. The decision to be made was whether or not it would be quicker to take the land route to Appin, sixteen circling miles about Loch Leven. The bridge, now crossed in seconds, has made such arithmetic unnecessary, and the Regional highway board, as if conscious that it has been remiss – or perhaps at the prompting of tradesmen in Kinlochleven – signposts the lochside road as “the scenic route”.
It is indeed a pleasant journey on a summer’s day, eastward below the soaring slopes of Mamore, then westward over the shoulder of Garbh Bheinn where David Balfour and Alan Breck sheltered in a trembling hide of birch leaves. On a harsh winter night, when there is no moon and mountain mists thicken the dark, the road can be hazardous. Coming south through the Great Glen because the A9 was closed by snow on Drumochter, Raeburn Mackie arrived at North Ballachulish too late for the last ferry of the evening. He travelled by Lochlevenside, and on a sharp bend above Caolasnacoan his life ended as he drove into the back of a lorry. By that cruel accident I lost a young and pleasant friend, and Scotland a good writer from whom much was expected.
