A HISTORY OF TARTAN

There was a time when wearing tartan was illegal in Scotland. of 1746 banned Scots from donning the crisscrossed woven cloth lest they find themselves in prison or, worse still, transported to a plantation) is intersected by an identical pattern interwoven at right angles (the ). The tartan design depends on the sequence of coloured wool used; for instance, a pattern might include four strands of green wool, followed by 56 strands of blue wool, succeeded by 28 red, 28 blue, and 4 green; and then the pattern flips backwards, mirroring the sequence just in reverse; 28 blue, 28 red, 56 blue, and four green. This pattern is called a ; and a length of tartan is simply made by repeating this over and over again. While tartan is typically associated with anything Scottish, tartan cloth has been unearthed in other places around the world; for instance, cloth fragments were discovered in salt mines in the Austrian Alps dating back to 1300 BCE; its distinctive pattern was also found on 4,000-year-old European corpses excavated from the scorched sands of the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region, China. Textile historians think that simple two-coloured tartan cloth was produced by ancient Celtic people around the 8th century BCE. In 1784, just two years after was repealed in Scotland, societies in Edinburgh set out to promote the ancient cloth once more. But it was, undoubtedly, the arrival of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 - decked out in a rather short tartan kilt complete with pink pantaloons - that ultimately sealed the fate of tartan, wrapping it up in Scottish national identity forever more.