Scots Origin of the Kilt

[Sherry]

Proof That Origin Of Kilt Is Scots

By Lesley Walsh

Wednesday 19th October 2005

An Ulster academic is set to turn the claim that the kilt was invented by the English on its head.

Orange Order historian Clifford Smyth said an English bias by history writers of the 19th century against the humble Highland Scots has robbed old Gaels of their true role in the creation of the garment held the world over as distinctly Scottish.


Mr Smyth, development officer with the Ulster Scots Language Society, has won a grant from the Arts Council for Northern Ireland to challenge the myth by writing a more faithful account of the kilt's true origins down the centuries.

Through a series of fortunate accidents and chance discoveries, Mr Smyth has discovered evidence disputing the identity of the creators of the male tartan skirt.

During his research he found, in the British Museum in London, a tantalising, original German cartoon depicting a Scottish warrrior.

Dated 1690, the warrior is wearing what is unmistakably a kilt, decades before its purported creation.

"The Highland warrior is taken from a much larger cartoon produced by the continental supporters of the Williamite cause at that time," said Mr Smyth.

"The importance of the figure is that it shows a Scottish soldier in a loosely-pleated, short kilt some 40 years before the short kilt was allegedly invented by two Englishmen, Rawlinson and Parkinson in the year 1727."Clearly there was a lot of bias against the Gaelic- speaking Highlanders, and this was evidence that they were prepared just to cast that aside," he said, of the cartoon's lowly Highlander.

Mr Smyth's archival digging has also brought him face to face with the people who discovered the Ulster tartan in Dungiven, Co Londonderry, in 1956.

Astonished that those who literally unearthed it on farmland were still alive, Mr Smyth got a "first hand account" of the discovery of the important fabric, found as a bundle of faded and earth-encrusted rags.

The historian's future book is actually an expansion of a lecture on the kilt which has been popularly received by local pensioners and business groups.

Known more for his serious political research, the historian's deviation to the topic of the kilt followed a foray, with his wife, into Scottish country dancing.

First appealing to his "sense of humour", Mr Smyth's studies "got more out of hand as I made more discoveries that other people didn't seem to know about".



l.walsh@newsletter.co.uk

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/story/23369

Wish they had included a shot of the German cartoon.
Sherry