Antigonish Plaids
Who knows how many centuries-old plaids and scraps of
tartan are still hidden away in attic kists just waiting to be
rediscovered to give palpitations to tartan researchers! Some
researchers are lucky enough to be 'on the spot' as it were, when
these surface to see the light of day again - Peter MacDonald was
one of the lucky ones.
Peter investigates two tartan Plaids from Antigonish County,
Nova Scotia. Peter is one of very few tartan academics and
practised researchers and it helps that he's also a fine handloom
weaver having undertaken every production process from sheep to
cloth!
The Gillies Plaid
In 1984 whilst
working at the now long defunct Scottish Tartans Museum in Comrie,
I received a letter from a Seumes Taylor in California containing
details and photographs of an old plaid that he had located in Nova
Scotia (NS). The plaid belonged to a woman named Katherine
MacKenzie (nee Gillies) who lived outside the town of Antigonish
but who was born and brought up in Arisaig, NS which is on the
coast about 30 miles to the west. The plaid had come down through
the Gillies family who had lived in Arisaig for many generations.
The family came from Morar in the NW Highlands c.1785. There is,
according to Mr Taylor, a family tradition that the plaid is over
200 years old and came from Scotland.
In 1997 I had an opportunity to visit Mrs MacKenzie and view the
plaid that which was in excellent condition on account of its being
kept in a chest with moth balls most of the time. Apart from being
able to confirm the sett details and colours I was not able to gain
much confirmatory information from Mrs MacKenzie who said that her
father would certainly have known about it. She knew that it was
old but not how old, and that it had always been in the family.
The technical details of the plaid are as follows: It comprises
two offset pieces of cloth 26.5" wide x 134.5" long with a 5"
fringe, which are joined at the pivot edge. The pattern contains
single full repeat roughly 13" wide plus an elaborate border sett
approximately 13.5" wide. It is finished at 30epi, which suggests a
28epi at the reed, which in turn was probably a 7 dent reed with 4
ends per split. Both the warp and weft yarns are singles and from
the photographs both appear to be 'z' spun. In his 1984 letter Mr
Taylor supplied small thread samples of each colour taken from the
fringe. These were subjected to spectrographic analysis by Dr.
George Taylor of the York Archaeological Laboratories who report
the following:
Sample Description Dye
1. Very dark green~ indigotin + tannin + a
little natural; pigment
2. Olive drab ~ indigo extract + a little
tannin
3. Red ~ cochineal
4. Red/White~ red - cochineal; white -
natural unpigmented
'The dyes in 1
are consistent with an attempt at getting a black. This was often
obtained by heavy dyeing with woad or indigo on a drab ground
produced from tannin (from bark or galls), or iron, or fustic chips
(a yellow dye). The present result is most consistent with the
first.
The olive drab was also dyed with blue and yellow, the latter
again probably a tannin-containing material. The blue, however, was
"indigo extract", made by treating indigo with sulphuric acid; this
was invented in Germany in 1740, patented in England in 1748, and
the blue was much used as a substitute for natural indigo as it was
easier to handle. There is evidence that olives made from yellow
plus "indigo extract" were popular in Scotland in the early
nineteenth century. However, "indigo extract" dyeings fade quickly,
and the dye went out of use late in the century, when better,
synthetic blue dyes became available. It is likely that the olive
in the plaid was originally a brighter green, which may be revealed
by examining the inside of the bundle of olive threads in the
textile itself. (In fact, the colour in the photos might reproduce
the original appearance!)
Both the reds were cochineal, which seems almost the norm for
Scottish plaids! 'The date of the textile is obviously post 1750
and probably pre 1885.' In fact, the colours in the main body of
the plaid were less weathered/faded and the original colours more
apparent. The 'very dark green' is black as suggested and the green
brighter at the fringe. This suggests that the plaid has been left
partially exposed to the light at some period.
If it is assumed that the plaid has always been in the Gillies
family then it has to have been woven either in Scotland between
c.1750-1785 or in NS between c.1785-1885. The size, fringing and
the nature of the border pattern (described below) mean that it is
unlikely that this plaid was ever intended to be worn. It is more
likely to have been woven for some special event such as a marriage
and used thereafter for household use such as a bedcover and/or
decoration for special events like births, deaths, marriages and
the like.
Fig 1: Gillies double plaid showing an example of a 'total
border'.
Threadcount: To the half sett, from the join out to, and
including, the selvedge pattern:
R/26 G12 K52 R4 G52 W2 R12
K4 R12 K/13
+ selvage K13 R12 K4 R12 W2
G52 R4 K52 W2 K12 R4 G4
R4 K50
In the 13 years between the time when this plaid was
brought to my attention and actually seeing it, I considered it to
be a unique and important example in the development of tartan.
What was thought to be unique about this plaid was the fact that
the border sett has been woven on the top and bottom ends of the
plaid as well as the sides. All previously known Scottish examples
have only shown borders at the side, and this technique had
generally disappeared from rural cloth by c.1800. The famous
weaving firm of Wm Wilson & Son of Bannockburn (1765-1926) did
list one 'Blanket Pattern' with a striped border in their 1819 Key
Pattern Book1 however, this can be considered to be an anachronism
that had probably ceased to be common by that date. As there are no
known examples of this 'total border' pattern in Scottish textiles
it can be assumed that either it was not practised here, or that it
was an old technique that has disappeared without trace but that
was taken to Nova Scotia and survived in that outpost of Gaeldom.
This is not inconceivable given that the step dance tradition of
the Highlands did exactly that, and was only rediscovered in the
middle the 20th century as were several older versions of Gaelic
songs and fiddle tunes. An alternative hypothesis is that the
technique was developed independently in Nova Scotia, however, I
doubt that early settlers had the time to experiment sufficiently
to develop the technique to the level demonstrated in this
plaid.
Jenny the Widow's Plaid
During my visit to Nova Scotia in 1997 I discovered another
plaid of the type demonstrating the 'total border' technique. It is
described below. However, given that this second plaid is single
width and the Gillies plaid is a joined, double, plaid, a process
which required great skill to get the pattern to match correctly,
the latter may still be considered in many ways to be the finest
known example of the Highland art of tartan weaving.
In attempting to trace to owners of the Gillies plaid I visited
the Antigonish Museum, Antigonish, NS. Whilst there, the curator
asked me to examine "a piece of cloth to see if it was a tartan".
What emerged from the storage box was a hand woven, naturally dyed
single width plaid with a 'total border'. The plaid is 31.5" x
180", woven at 30epi and had a 6" twisted fringe at each end making
192" in total with two repeats of the pattern plus the border.
Apparently it had recently been donated by a family from Florida,
USA whose origins were from the Antigonish area. The family
tradition is that it was woven in c.1895 by Jenny 'the Widow'
MacDonald (nee Chisholm) who lived at St. Andrews, Marydale,
Antigonish County. The family background is Knoydart MacDonalds,
Moidart MacNeils and Strathglas Chisholms all of whom arrived in NS
c.1800-1840.
Threadcount: To the half sett, from the centre out to, and
including, the selvedge pattern:
R5 B10 G12 K4 W4 R21 +
selvage R21 W8 G22 K4 R4
B8 K10 W8 K12 R6 B12 G20
W20
The use of a selvedge pattern, particularly of this nature,
natural dyes and being woven in tartan makes the date of 1895 seem
very unrealistic. 1795 would be more in keeping with this type of
plaid. Marydale and Arisaig are about 20 miles apart in Antigonish
County. For two plaids both using a previously unknown development
of a traditional Scottish Highland weaving technique to be
unrelated in some way seems very unlikely. Both use a single yarn
for their warp and weft, are naturally dyed with similar colours,
have a similar density (30 epi) and most importantly use the
selvedge pattern around the whole plaid, a technique that I have
termed 'total border pattern'.
There appears to be strong circumstantial evidence to suggest
that they were produced by the same hand or at least from the same
weaving circle. The dye analysis of the Gillies plaid suggests the
use of sulfinated indigo which, if also used in the MacDonald
(Jenny the Widow MacDonald), plaid would make the family's 1895
date even less likely. Small 1" samples of each colour from the
fringe would established this.
If this technique is unknown in surviving Scottish textiles
then, as previously mentioned, if the Gillies plaid was woven here,
the technique must have died out some time after c.1785 when the
family emigrated. If it developed in NS then that must have
happened some time after this date. Given the Morar (Moidart)
origins of the Gillies and the Moidart, and close by Knoydart,
origins of the MacNeil and MacDonald families respectively, it is
possible that this was a technique used in that part of the
Highlands and was taken to NS. It would have only needed one weaver
to keep the tradition alive in an area of NS for several plaids to
have been produced at a later date. However there are several
problems with the idea of a NS origin:
1. 1785 was three years after the repeal of the
'Dress Act' of 1747, which forbade the wearing of Highland Dress
and the possession of tartan amongst the common Highlanders. Many
old techniques had already been lost by the time that the emigrants
left Scotland for NS.
2. The early years in Canada were extremely
hard and it seems unlikely that people started weaving tartan
immediately especially as they were often a generation who had no
direct knowledge of its production. Their main concern was for
survival.
3. The use of cochineal, and to some degree
indigo, in these two plaids makes them an expensive financial
outlay. Again this would suggest they were not produced immediately
upon arrival.
4. Despite the claim that the MacDonald plaid
was woven by Jenny the weaver in c.1895, there appears to be no
tradition of tartan weaving being carried out in NS whereas
overshot weaving was the common practice in the 19th and early 20th
centuries. It might of course be that tartan weaving was localised
to a small area Antigonish.
No other old pieces of tartan are known to have been found in
NS/Cape Breton although given the isolated nature of the area until
recently, it seems likely that there are still examples to be
found. The uniqueness of the two plaids described suggests a common
origin but at this stage it is impossible to determine whether this
is Scotland or Nova Scotia. It seems very unlikely that such a
selvage pattern developed in isolation in NS and I feel it is more
likely to represent a lost Highland technique. Everything about the
quality of the material suggests a second half 18th century
Highland origin. If these were woven in NS some time between
1800-1885 then this would represent a further remarkable
preservation of Scottish techniques that had disappeared here by
that time. Much more research is needed on the origins of these two
particular plaids and the dyes used in the MacDonald plaid. There
should also be a concerted effort to identify other tartan relics
in NS and Cape Breton before the further disintegration of their
Gaelic diaspora caused by the economics of the late 20th and early
21st centuries means that any clues are lost or dispersed.
© Peter Eslea MacDonald March 2004