Scottish Late Seventeenth-Century Male Clothing: Some Context for the Barrock Estate Finds

Abstract

In 1920 the remains of a body were discovered, buried in peat moss at Quintfall Hill on the Barrock Estate, near Keiss, Caithness, Scotland. The corporeal remains and the clothing were transferred to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh where they remain to this day. Shortly after the find, an account of the discovery appeared in the Journal of the Antiquaries of Scotland, but apart from passing reference, very little further consideration was given to these clothes. In this article, the first of two dealing with this topic, the clothing finds are described and discussed in the context of other Scottish finds of the period c. 1700 and in relation to contemporary observations and descriptions of dress found across the Scottish mainland and in its outlying Islands. The garments will also be considered in relation to the dominant historical dress narrative, which has been based largely on elite clothing.

Keywords:

• Scottish dress
• Highland dress
• Lowland dress
• tailoring
• seventeenth-century men’s fashion
• Scottish peat bog finds
• Barrock Estate finds
• Caithness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Naomi Tarrant, Trevor Cowie, Helen Osmani and Margaret Wilson — all current or former staff members at the National Museum of Scotland — for their help with access, information and photography. Thanks also to the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Janet Arnold Bursary for funds to undertake some of this research and to the Convenery of Trades of Edinburgh for their kind assistance and permission to reproduce the Chalmers painting. I am also grateful to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for permission to reproduce the drawing by Stewart Orr.

Notes

¹ James Hogg, ‘A Scots Mummy’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 14:79 (1823), 188–90.

² Quoted in Trevor Cowie et al., ‘Bog Bodies from Scotland: Old Finds, New Records’, Journal of Wetland Archaeology, 10 (2011), 1–45 (p. 30).

³ Cowie et al., ‘Bog Bodies from Scotland’, pp. 9–10.

⁴ Hogg, ‘A Scots Mummy’, p. 190.

⁵ National Museums Collection Centre, 242 West Granton Road, Granton, Edinburgh, EH5 1JA. The Barrock objects and clothing reference is H.NA 408-416.

⁶ Stewart Orr, ‘Clothing Found on a Skeleton Discovered at Quintfall Hill, Barrock Estate, near Wick’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 55 (1920–21), 213–21.

⁷ Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland 1769 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000), p. 120. The book was first published by John Monk, in Chester, 1771.

⁸ John Brand, A New Description of Orkney, Zetland, Pightland-Firth and Caithness (Edinburgh, 1703), p. 149.

⁹ Karen J. Cullen, Famine in Scotland: The ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 86, 125.

¹⁰ Donald J. Withrington and Ian R. Grant (eds), The Statistical Account of Scotland 1791–1799, Vol XVIII, Caithness and Sutherland (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1979), p. 266. Kelt was a coarse black cloth and many countrymen kept black sheep specially to provide wool for this cloth. See Marjorie Plant, ‘Clothes and the Eighteenth Century Scot’, The Scottish Historical Review, 27:103 (April 1948), 1–24 (p. 16).

¹¹ Alexander Fenton, The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997), p. 461.

¹² Wadmal was a woollen cloth woven in Scandinavia and the Orkney, Faroe and Shetland Islands. Its manufacture reaches back to Viking times. See Thor Ewing, Viking Clothing (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2006), p. 146.

¹³ J. Burnett et al., ‘The Practice of Dyeing Wool in Scotland, c.1790–c.1840’, Folk Life, 42 (2003–2004), 7–31 (p. 9).

¹⁴ The group portrait of Wrights and Masons by Roderick Chalmers is held by the Convenery of the Trades of Edinburgh at ‘Ashfield’, 61 Melville Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7HL. The painting can be viewed by appointment and is here reproduced by the Convenery’s kind permission. Chalmers appears in the group portrait, which is staged outside the Palace of Holyroodhouse, as the artist figure. He was by trade a heraldic painter.

¹⁵ Helen M. Dingwall, Late Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh: A Demographic Study (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 137.

¹⁶ Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, circa 1695, including a Voyage to St Kilda (first publ. 1698) (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), pp. 318–19.

¹⁷ Thomas Morer, A Short Account of Scotland (London: printed for Tho. Newborough, 1702), pp. 14–15.

¹⁸ Edmund Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, as Related by Edmund Burt (first publ. London: S. Birt, 1754) (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd, 1998), pp. 40–41. Burt was a surveyor or engineer, mostly stationed at Inverness while working on General Wade’s strategic road- and bridge-building programme in the north of Scotland.

¹⁹ Morer, A Short Account of Scotland, p. 9.

²⁰ Quoted in Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 231.

²¹ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, p. 246.

²² Giorgio Riello, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers, and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 85. Riello notes that left vs. right was known at the beginning of the seventeenth century, although straight dominated. For heeled shoes, making a left and a right necessitated two lasts, which remained uneconomical until improvements in technology in the early nineteenth century made this viable.

²³ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 236.

²⁴ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, pp. 245–46.

²⁵ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, p. 246.

²⁶ Mairead Dunlevy, Dress in Ireland (London: Batsford, 1989), pp. 55–59, 71, 74, 77–79. Seventeenth-century trews were recovered from peat moss at Kilcommon, Co. Tipperary, Killery, Co. Sligo and Dungiven, Co. Derry. The find at Dava Moor, Morayshire, is noted in Naomi Tarrant, ‘The 17^th Century Doublet from Keiss, near Wick, Caithness’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, 131 (2001), 319–26 (p. 325).

²⁷ Quoted in John Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1962), p. 35.

²⁸ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 231.

²⁹ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 231.

³⁰ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, p. 455.

³¹ Plant, ‘Clothes and the Eighteenth Century Scot’, p. 15.

³² Helen Kelsall and Keith Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle 300 Years Ago: New Light on Edinburgh and Border Families with a New Chapter on Music Making (Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press, 1993), pp. 133–34.

³³ Stuart Maxwell and Robin Hutchison, Scottish Costume 1550–1850 (London: A & C Black, 1958), p. 102; John Mitchell, ‘Memories of Ayrshire about 1780’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, 6 (1939), 241–334 (p. 266).

³⁴ Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis, Consisting of Original Papers and Documents Relating to the History of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, ed. by the Iona Club, Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Thomas G. Stevenson, 1847), p. 43. William Sacheverell was Governor of the Isle of Man, and was employed in 1688 in the attempt to recover the stores of the Florida, one of the great vessels of the Spanish Armada (which was blown up and sunk in the harbour of Tobermory in Mull, exactly one hundred years before). He made an excursion through the Isle of Mull, and thence to Icolmkill. In 1702 he published in London an account of this excursion, along with an account of the Isle of Man. In this volume, he describes the dress, armour and general appearance of the Highlanders as he saw them in the Isle of Mull in 1688.

³⁵ Morer, A Short Account of Scotland, pp. 7–8.

³⁶ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, pp. 246–47.

³⁷ Guy Miège, The Present State of Great Britain. In Two Parts. The I. of South. II of North Britain, Vol. 2 (London, 1707), p. 47.

³⁸ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, pp. 231–32.

³⁹ I. F. Grant, Highland Folk Ways (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 226–27.

⁴⁰ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 232.

⁴¹ Michael Newton, Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009), pp. 196–97.

⁴² Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 15–41 (p. 22).

⁴³ Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis, p. 43.

⁴⁴ Morer, A Short Account of Scotland, pp. 8–9.

⁴⁵ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 232.

⁴⁶ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, p. 319.

⁴⁷ Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis, p. 43.

⁴⁸ Morer, A Short Account of Scotland, p. 9. A thrum-cap or bonnet was one made of waste yarn.

⁴⁹ Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, pp. 245–46.

⁵⁰ Burt, Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland, p. 231.

⁵¹ The collar on Patie Birnie’s coat or cloak is familiar from the eighteenth-century pattern-cutting diagrams for a great-coat, reprinted in Norah Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 95.

⁵² Diaries, accounts and editorial commentary that shed light on the clothing practices of the gentry in lowland Scotland can be found in Kelsall and Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle 300 Years Ago; W. C. Dickinson, Two Students at St Andrews 1711–1716 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1952); Helen Kelsall and Keith Kelsall, An Album of Scottish Families, 1694–96: Being the First Instalment of George Home’s Diary, Supplemented by Much Further Research into the Edinburgh and Border Families Forming an Extensive Network (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990).

⁵³ Dickinson, Two Students at St Andrews, p. xliii.

⁵⁴ Kelsall and Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle 300 Years Ago, p. 35.

⁵⁵ Kelsall and Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle 300 Years Ago, pp. 38, 202; Mitchell, ‘Memories of Ayrshire about 1780’, p. 267. Mitchell records that clothes made by country tailors were not very skilfully fitted, despite their long apprenticeship. They would travel with an apprentice who would carry the goose (iron) and the smoothing board, and in summer it was not uncommon for them to arrive with the early dawn, at 4am.

⁵⁶ Kelsall and Kelsall, An Album of Scottish Families, p. 3.

⁵⁷ Plant, ‘Clothes and the Eighteenth Century Scot’, p. 21.

⁵⁸ Mitchell, ‘Memories of Ayrshire about 1780’, p. 262.