The next time you wear a kilt...

When I put on a kilt, I do so with some trepidation. Not because I am concerned with small matters of underwear detail, or even with the reaction of trousered onlookers, but because I live in fear of the inevitable conversation that will, at some point, ensue.

My interlocutor may be another Scot, someone boasting Scots ancestry, or, more forgivably, an interested foreigner. They will usually be wearing a kilt, too. Their opening gambit will be something along the lines of “what tartan is this?” or “what’s your clan, then?”

Why should this perturb me? It’s a matter of tradition, culture, history and national pride. None of these things is as important to me as my questioner will assume.

As an item of clothing, the Scottish kilt in its current incarnation is warm, elegant, functional, and just a damn nice thing to wear. It allows the air to circulate (with or without underwear), it doesn’t restrict movement, and, contrary to popular English myth, it’s remarkably insulated against cold weather. It is, after all, made from several yards of woollen cloth. My argument is not with the garment itself, but with the enormous cultural baggage people try to cram into the confined space of a sporran.

Anyone who has lived in Scotland, visited Scotland or even seen pictures of people in Scotland going about their daily lives will know that it is not a nation of habitual kilt-wearers. Of course in areas of heavy tourist traffic the kilt count goes up astonishingly (along with the incidence of tartan generally), and in some rural areas you may come across the odd kilted gentleman out for a stroll. But the good people of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen do not have wardrobes crammed with filibegs. No, kilts are strictly “weddings, Burns Suppers and other formal occasions” garments. They were, in fact, never a garment of everyday use in Lowland Scotland.

Whether it was ever an everyday garment beyond the ‘highland line’ is a hotly contested question that generates astonishingly strong opinions, raised voices, clenched fists and bad language. To understand the controversy requires an understanding of the highland/lowland divide and how romanticised ‘hielandism’ has become synonymous with Scottishness.

A little context here. Over a period of about a thousand years, (roughly from the late Roman period to the middle ages), the territory now known as Scotland hosted Gaels, Romans, Picts (who may or may not have been Britons), Caledonians (see Picts), Britons, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and a smattering of other Europeans – Lombard merchants, Jewish traders, and probably a few Spaniards who took a wrong turn in the Bay of Biscay. Most modern day Scots with a long family history in the country probably have an extravagantly mixed ancestry. Despite some competition (from Norse, for one, and Norman French), two languages eventually survived as the dominant modes of communication: Gaelic in the north and west (the highlands), Scots (a variant of English) in the south and east (the lowlands). No one can say for sure how and why Gaelic displaced earlier languages (such as the elusive ‘Pictish’) or why it and other languages (such as Brythonic Celtic – akin to Welsh) were displaced by English in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

However it came about, by the early modern period (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Scotland was linguistically, politically and socially divided between the Scots-speaking lowlands and Gaelic highlands and islands (or Gaeltachdt). John Knox added his own essential contribution – austere Calvinism- that took root strongly in the lowlands, and sporadically in the highlands. Royal power and parliament were essentially lowland, and highlanders were regarded by outsiders as wild, untamed savages.

Within the highlands themselves, the clan chiefs (heads of extended ‘family’ power structures of which the chief was the ‘father’) were habitually in conflict with each other, jostling for power, some seeking favour with the lowlands-based government, others snubbing their English-speaking neighbours.

And by the seventeenth century, the Gaelic-speaking mountain people and their chiefs were wearing something called a belted plaid, a broad swathe of woollen or wool-linen mix wrapped around the waist, secured with a belt and arranged over the shoulder. The cloth was either a drab colour or carried a checked pattern depending on the wealth of the wearer, the occasion and the availability of suitable dyes.

Over about a century, highland people (as well as the rest of Britain and Ireland) were involved in the extended civil strife of first the ‘English’ Civil Wars and then the Jacobite resistance to and rebellions against the royal Houses of Orange and Hanover, who replaced the Stuarts as the wearers of the unified crowns of Scotland and England. Like everyone else involved, highlanders fought on both sides, changed allegiances and often pursued their own ends. Most ordinary highlanders’ allegiances were determined by those of their chief who in some cases wielded something approaching absolute power over his ‘flock’.

Highland men and women made a strong impression on their contemporaries during this period and much of the later romanticisation of highland culture draws on stories from this time.

Military exploits underlined the image of Highland martial tradition. “Montrose’s March” was the outstanding guerilla action of the First Civil War. The Marquis of Montrose led a small force of highlanders and Irishmen over the mountains in the depths winter and gave Argyll, chief of the Campbells, a proverbial bloody nose. Accounts speak evocatively of highlanders, having marched over 30 miles in the snowy mountains, some of them barefoot, eating oats off the point of their dirks before screaming down the hillside at the assembled Campbells (also highlanders) and lowland levies. At Killiecrankie in 1689, the Jacobite nobleman James Graham of Claverhouse (‘Bluidy Clavers’, or ‘Bonnie Dundee’, depending on your affiliations), led a highland force that routed the ‘British’ army (though he died in the battle). Highland people were involved on both sides in the intermittent power struggles that ran on into the 18th century until the final coup de grace went to the Hanoverians with the tragic slaughter of “Bonnie Prince Charlie’s” highlanders on Culloden Moor.

When the dust had settled by the end of the eighteenth century, the highlands were effectively ‘subdued’, a process that involved cultural repression (tartan and plaids were outlawed for a period and bagpipes were regarded as an ‘instrument of war’) and a long process of emigration and eviction, which continued well into the nineteenth century with the infamous Highland Clearances. But with their outlandish dress, their ‘savage’ tongue and an unconventional approach to warfare, highlanders had made a lasting impression.

When all real threat of rebellion had disappeared, the cultural elites of Edinburgh, including the great romanticist of Scottish history and folklore, Walter Scott, were free to eulogise a culture and a way of life that, though not dead, was under severe pressure and in decline.

The popular image of these ‘uncouth’, violent barbarians was juxtaposed with the self-image of Calvinist, lowland Scotland which viewed itself as a civilized, European nation. This popular image has endured, metamorphosing through more than one romantic lens into the ‘noble savage’ portrait which is still trotted out by advertisers, tourist agencies and many Scots themselves.

Viewed simplistically, there wasn’t much in the way of dress and language to distinguish a lowland Scot from his or her southern neighbours, the English. Of course, Scots itself is a fully fledged language, and the culture and history of the country is sufficiently different from that of England for rabid nationalists to stoke their fires. Scottish literature (in Scots, Gaelic and standard English) holds its own. Scottish music is distinct. Charles Renee Macintosh is but one of many Scottish artists whose horizons were to the East, to Europe, rather than South, to London. But these factors are not visible to the public at large – they are recognized by a minority. What Scott and other early Romantics struck upon, and which has been perpetuated ever since, was a symbol of ethnic solidarity and pride - a mode of dress unlike any other in Europe.

If Walter Scott didn’t speak Gaelic, he and his contemporaries could at least begin the process of the appropriation of ‘highland dress’ as a symbol, not of the Gaeltachdt but of Scotland as a whole. Ironically, this process happened around the same time that the Gaelic speaking people in the mountains were being evicted to make way for sheep.

The martial tradition of the clans was now harnessed in the service of the Hanoverian monarchs, any significant independent military power having been wiped out after the Jacobite disaster at Culloden (1746). Young men from the glens who would once have raided and fought for their chief now enlisted in their lords’ regiments, raised for the British army. Throughout this process there were numerous mutinies when the highlanders ran up against an inflexible uncaring military establishment which included many of their traditional leaders - the chieftains’ immediate relatives – people who, by highland thinking, were obliged to protect and nurture ‘their people’: the crofters and drovers who formed the rank and file in the regiments.

Some time in the eighteenth century, the belted plaid gave way to a trimmer version, the filibeg ‘little plaid’, or kilt, and would come to form part of the uniform of many ‘highland’ regiments. The genesis of the kilt provokes almost as much controversy as Darwinism versus Creationism. One version runs that a certain Mr Rawlinson, an English manager of an iron foundry in the highlands hit on the idea of a scaled-down belted plaid because his Gaelic workers’ clothing wasn’t suited to heavy industry. Others argue that some time near the start of that century highlanders had hit upon the idea themselves – to use half the fabric from their plaid and simply wrap it round the waist and dispense with the part that covered the shoulder and upper torso. In any case, by the start of the nineteenth century, the kilt (albeit without sewn pleats) was an established item of clothing.

What is almost uncontested (except by diehard romanticists) is that the whole idea of family or clan tartans was really a development of the late 1700s and 1800s. Wilson’s of Bannockburn, near Stirling, wove tartan for private clients and the army. Situated south of the Highland Line and thus outside the area of stringent anti-Gaelic prohibitions, they could even produce the cloth when it was banned in its region of origin. They catalogued and patented their tartans and referred to them by the names of customers, some tartans changing names as new orders came in. So, for example, if Lord Suchandsuch of MacWhatsit ordered a design, it became known as the MacWhatsit tartan. Before the development of the ‘Clan Tartan’, chiefs would sometimes wear two or three different designs simultaneously- for the plaid, hose and jacket. Any tendency towards particular designs was determined more by client’s wealth and taste, or lack thereof.

By the time the kilt came south, worn by highland gentry and the new recruits to the ‘highland regiments’ in the army, the society which had worn the belted plaid was undergoing massive changes – the Anglicisation of their aristocracy, who were introduced to the luxuries of the southern nobility, the erosion of autonomy, and the beginnings of ‘Improvement’, the ‘civilisation’ of the region through English language, law enforcement and ultimately the replacement of a mixed rural economy economy with large scale sheep farming, and the eviction of inhabitants to make room for this.

The traditional dress of the area had given way to lowland breeches and jackets when tartan was banned after the ’45 (the rebellion leading to the battle of Culloden). When tartan became legal again north of the highland line, and fashionable south of it, ordinary folks could not afford to replace the plaids they had thrown away during the prohibition years.

Thus, the filibeg, that controversial adaptation of the belted plaid, became a mainstay of army uniform and a costume of choice amongst the elites throughout Scotland, and in England, but not the everyday wear of ordinary people in its region of origin. In Victorian times, the Queen’s love affair with the highlands, amongst the first of Britain’s ‘colonial’ territories, further bolstered the kilt, and its now-firmly established connection with huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, tweed jackets and the British Royal Family.

The kilt that I and so many other Scots wear with such pride has a checkered and contested history. The current form is of dubious provenance but by a kind of cultural sleight-of-hand it has become a symbol of Scottishness (not just highlandness) conflated with romantic images of the highlanders of yore and virile militarism. When we ‘dress up’, we enter a hyper-reality. Chests swell with pride, tears form at the skirl of the pipes, we equate ourselves (the men, at least), with the wild noble savages of our imagined past and the forlorn bravery of Culloden. By donning a token of our supposed history and heritage, we enter the maze of contested symbolism.

Does this mean, then, that we should chuck the whole lot out? I would say no. There has been a healthy resurgence of interest in the kilt, and in new interpretations of it – in new materials, new colours, new contexts. There are even websites advocating trouserless living as a healthy, masculine option for men (see http://www.kiltmen.com/). As a garment, it’s functional and stylish. It’s warm, and it lends a certain swagger to the gait of even the most ungainly of blokes.

But when we do don the filibeg, maybe we could do so with a lighter sporran unweighted by all that unnecessary baggage.