Swatching the Mail

[OC Richard]

Apparently there has been much discussion about the tartan's legitimacy, or illegitimacy as the case may be. It is not a recognized tartan by the Chief of Clan Macmillan, hence the "controversy".

The controversy is discussed by DC Stewart in the brilliant book The Setts of the Scottish Tartans:

"Reference has been make to printed definitions of tartan designs, as distinct from illustrations of them. The first useful instance of these is found in the appendix to Logan's The Scottish Gael (1831). Here he sets out in tabular form the proportions of specimens he had examined...

In 1881 M'Intyre North published The Book of the Club of True Highlanders; its interest for us lies in the tables of setts of tartans printed therein.

These the author claimed had been given him by James Logan...
We have checked them with Logan's tables of 1831; six were new, six old ones had been omitted, and in the remainder several changes are to be found. These later counts have been reprinted in a still more recent work, but unfortunately the original had not first been checked, and many errors were repeated without comment. Errors there unquestionably were, but where the result of working out Logan's count conflicts with the modern version of a design, it is not always clear whether the mistake lay in Logan's count or in the modern rendering. The Buchanan tartan of today is the most strikingly asymmetrical one we have, yet Logan's table results in a design made up of the same elements, but arranged to be perfectly symmetrical. Since it is against the character of tartan to be other than symmetrical, it is the more modern sett that requires justification...

Smibert, in 1850, showed a version which, while coarser in its proportions, is substantially the same as the specimen from which Logan made his count. Smibert obtained most of his specimens from Messrs William Wilson & Son, of Bannnockburn, who are known to have been among the original subscribers to Logan's The Scottish Gael. We may presume that the symmetrical version was the one being produced at Bannockburn early in the nineteenth century...

...we find in McIan's drawing showing a Robertson tartan irregularities similar to those found in the Buchanan, though we do not have to suppose that his version of the Robertson was ever in production by the makers. McIan's was the first illustration of this Buchanan tartan (the asymmetrical one) and there was time for it to be used as a model by Edinburgh weavers before the Smiths made their book (The Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland, 1850), for McIan's Buchanan plate was issued in 1843.

Subsequent manufacturers have in general use the Smith work as their source rather than Logan or Smibert, and in this way the irregular sett has been perpetuated...

There is a tartan sometimes called the MacMillan Ancient. This resembles the Buchanan, and derives from one of McIan's drawings; but as in the McIan-Logan work the MacMillan tartan is stated to be identical with the Buchanan, the making of a distinction between the two is pointless."

So this MacMillan tartan is doubly in doubt: first, whether the Buchanan tartan ought to be accepted as a MacMillan tartan, and second in the fact that the asymmetrical Buchanan tartan itself is the result of a slapdash illustration by McIan.