Ulster has its own 350-year old tartan, which has an intriguing history. On 28 April 1956, the Coleraine Chronicle reported the discovery by a farm labourer of ragged clothing dug out of an earth bank on the farm of Mr William Dixon, in the townland of Flanders, near Dungiven, County Londonderry.
The find consisted of a woollen jacket or jerkin, a small portion of a mantle or cloak, trews or tartan trousers, and leather brogues. This was the style of clothing worn by men in those parts in the 16th or early 17th century.
Archaeologists from the Ulster Museum were invited to analyse the discovery. A block of peat containing fragments of the clothing was examined by Mr A G Smith of the Department of Botany at Queen’s University, revealing a high concentration of pine pollen. Scots pine had been introduced into Ireland in the 1600s. The likelihood was that the tartan cloth was at least that old.
Peaty loam destroys flesh and bone while preserving fabrics like wool and leather. No body was found, though it is possible that the site marked a grave.
Audrey Henshall from Edinburgh’s National Museum of Antiquities examined the woollen cloth, which had been well preserved. Its reddish brown staining was due to its being buried for hundreds of years in peat. The trews had been made up from tartan woven in the Donegal style, in strips varying in width and distance from each other. The remaining items were also subjected to rigorous analysis.
Audrey Henshall concluded that while the mantle was Irish, the trews almost certainly originated in the Highlands. The logical explanation was that tartan cloth woven in Donegal had been exported to Scotland. There the material had been made up into tartan trews, which was the fashion in the Highlands. These trews started off as clothing for some wealthy person. When they were unearthed in the soil at Flanders townland, the trews were covered in patches. The large variety of materials used indicated that the trews had been passed from one person to another, adding to the mystery.
The textile expert supported the soil analysis, dating the find to between 1600 and 1650. The original colours proved very difficult to distinguish, which was to be expected, given that the tartan had been buried for centuries. However, Audrey Henshall’s specialist techniques enabled her to extrapolate what the original colourings in the cloth would have been. Having identified the colours red, dull green, dark brown and orange or yellow, the antiquarian stated that the ground consisted of wide blocks of red and green, divided into squares of about one inch by groups of narrow lines of dark orange, dark brown and green.
A hand-loom in the Belfast College of Technology was used to re-create the Ulster tartan, based on the colours of the rags in the earth bank. In 1958 a tailor’s model, dressed in the mantle, jacket, trews and brogues, graced the entrance hall of the Ulster Museum.
The tartan was registered with the Scottish Tartan Society in the early 1970s as “weathered Ulster Tartan”. Later a second pattern, based on Audrey Henshall’s reconstructed colours, was also registered with the Society. This restored version is known as “red Ulster tartan”. The Society accepted that both tartans were genuine.
Originally Posted by Matthews
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