To Black Watch or not to Black Watch?

[macwilkin]

I just reread the beginning of this thread and noticed this statement.

In The Setts Of The Scottish Tartans Donald C Stewart writes

BLACK WATCH

All the accounts of the inception of the Black Watch tartan speak of it as a design new at the time when the regiment was formed. In that it is not identical with any then-exisiting pattern, this is true enough. There remains the possibility that it was an abstraction from patterns already in use.

Many of the tartans of today are founded on the scheme of the Black Watch, and some of them we know to have been admittedly built on it, such as the Forbes and the Gordon. But there are others that may be earlier than the Black Watch. Unfortunately, it is difficult to fix the age of these. Yet, in addition to the merely traditional designs, there are several actual fragments, of great age, in which the characteristic feature of the Black Watch is to be seen. DW Stweart shows the design of a fragment, named the MacRae Hunting, and dating from before 1715, which is clearly of the Black Watch type, and the fragment he describes as having been worn by Prince Charles Edward while in the MacKintosh county contains the same germ-idea. (The author goes on to enumerate several other examples.)

Whatever the actual sources of these fragments may have been, they seem to rule out the idea that the Black Watch tartan was entirely original, and at the same time rule out the neccessity of supposing that such tartans as the Athol Murray derive from the Black Watch.


CAMPBELL

Campbell of Argyll or Campbell of Lochawe consist of the Black Watch as a foundation with alternately a white and a yellow line...

The Smiths write of is as the oldest of the Campbell designs and members of the Clan have adduced it to support their claim that the Black Watch is essentially a Campbell tartan.

Remember though, that Stewart wrote this in the 1960s. You might wish to review what the late tartan scholar James Scarlett had to say about the origins of the Government Sett. I'm sure Matt & Peter will chime in on this as well...

T.