That bagpipe-playing man in a tartan kilt isn't all he's cracked up to be

The tartan tribe. Photo by Melody Ayres-Griffiths on Unsplash

The bagpipe-playing man in a tartan kilt is an invention, a wildly successful one.

In ‘ The Invention of Tradition ‘, the 1983 book edited by two Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the 17th century invention of “the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition”.

Whenever Scotsman “gather together to celebrate their national identity”, he writes, “they assert it openly by certain distinctive national apparatus… to which they ascribe great antiquity, (but) is in fact largely modern.”

The kilt, woven in a tartan whose colour and pattern supposedly indicates a Scottish “clan”, was invented by Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker industrialist, in the 1720s.

The invention of a Scottish pedigree was begun by Scots themselves a half-century later.

The displacement of the harp for the bagpipe as a ‘traditional’ musical instrument of the Scots also came about in the 18th and 19th …