The story of the Isle of Skye tartan is closely tied to the island’s history, its crofting communities, and the people who carried their connection to Skye around the world. Before dawn on 19 April 1882, about fifty policemen set out from Portree in the rain and marched south along the shore of the Sound of Raasay. They had been brought up from Glasgow by steamer the day before, because the whole police force of Inverness-shire was not thought equal to the job. Their orders were to arrest five men.
The men lived in the townships of the Braes, a string of crofts on the steep ground between the sea and the hill of Ben Lee. For generations the people there had grazed their cattle and sheep on Ben Lee. In 1865 the landlord, Lord MacDonald, had taken the hill from them and let it to a sheep farmer. In the autumn of 1881 the crofters told the factor that they would pay no more rent until the hill was given back, and in the spring they drove their stock up onto it. A sheriff officer sent to serve notices had his papers taken from him and burned. That was the offence.
The police reached the townships as the light came up and took the five men from their beds. The trouble started on the way back.
Stones
Word had gone round the Braes in the night. By the time the column came to the narrowest point of the road, where it runs between a rock face and a drop to the shore, more than a hundred people were waiting on the slopes above it. A great many of them were women. They had gathered stones.
What followed was called the Battle of the Braes, and the name was only half a joke. The crofters came down onto the road and tried to take the prisoners back. The police drew their batons and charged. Stones came down from the hillside. Women were clubbed. Policemen were cut about the head. A newspaper correspondent who had come with the column, and who had expected a quiet morning, wrote a description of the fight that went round the world. When it was over the police had held on to their five prisoners and got them to Portree, and a dozen people on each side were bleeding.
The five were tried in Inverness and fined small sums, which sympathisers paid for them within the hour. That was not the end. The government, alarmed by what the newspapers were saying, sent a commission under Lord Napier to tour the Highlands and hear the crofters out. Its report in 1884 was followed by the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, which gave the crofters of the Highlands and Islands security in their homes, fair rents fixed by a court, and the right to hand their crofts to their children. It was the first time the law of the land had taken the people’s side against the landlords since the Clearances began.
There is a memorial by the road at the Braes now, a rough stone with an inscription in Gaelic and English, close to the place where the women came down the hill.
The island of the mist
Skye is the largest island of the Inner Hebrides and the most famous, and its beauty is the kind that makes people want to own a piece of it. The Cuillin ridge is the finest mountain range in Britain. The Trotternish peninsula has cliffs and rock pinnacles like nowhere else. Its Gaelic name is often translated as the winged isle, for the shape of it, and its other name is Eilean a’ Cheò, the Isle of the Mist.
Its people left in tens of thousands, to Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, to North Carolina, to Otago and Queensland. What the Braes had done was to remind the ones who stayed that they could still fight, and the ones who had gone that they still belonged.
It was one of the descendants of the emigrants who gave the island its tartan.
A competition
Scottish tartans belong mostly to clans. The great clans of Skye, MacLeod, MacDonald, MacKinnon, MacQueen, all have theirs. But a good many people from Skye are none of those things, and a good many more feel that their tie is to the island rather than to any one family.
In 1992 a woman named Rosemary Nicolson Samios did something about it. The tartan registers record that she was an Australian of Skye descent who had come to live on the island, and that she initiated a district tartan for it and ran a worldwide competition to find the design. The winner was a weaver from Lewis, Angus MacLeod. The first commercial lengths were woven in kilt weight in 1993 at the Lochcarron mills at North Strome, on the mainland opposite, within sight of the Cuillin.
The register says that the colours depict those of the island. They do. The ground is a soft moorland brown. Bands of green in two shades carry the crofts and the summer hill. Broad lines of purple are the heather in August. A single thin line runs through the dark green, and the register makes a point of noting that it is light grey and not white. It is the mist.
The Isle of Skye tartan has become one of the best loved of all the district tartans, and it is offered by retailers made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes and scarves, or by the yard. Anyone with a connection to the island may wear it, which for many families abroad means anyone who has been told, as a child, that the family came from Skye.
Brisbane, and then the Braes
Callum Nicolson is forty-four, a physiotherapist in Brisbane, and his people were among the crofters of the Braes. He knows this because his grandmother kept a copy of the newspaper report of 1882, folded into the family Bible, and because the name is in it. His great-great-great-grandmother, the family says, was on the hillside with a stone in her hand.
He is going to Skye in September for the first time. He has planned it around one thing: he intends to walk up Ben Lee, the hill they fought for, and he intends to do it in a kilt.
Choosing the tartan was the easy part. The island’s own, for a man whose family belonged to the island before they belonged to anywhere else. The rest he had to learn. He had assumed a kilt came in sizes. What he found at Scottish Kilt, where he ordered it, was a workshop whose entire trade is the made-to-measure highland kilt, cut for each customer in any of more than five thousand tartans, and which asked him for three numbers instead of a size.
His waist, taken at the navel, where a kilt sits, which was three inches more than his trousers claimed. His hips at the widest. The length from his waist to the middle of his kneecap, which his wife measured while he knelt on the kitchen floor, because a kilt should just touch the ground when its wearer kneels. He asked for five yards rather than eight, since it was going up a hill and not down an aisle, and for a washable yarn, since it was going up a hill in Skye in September.
It came in six weeks, brown and green and purple, with a grey thread through it that he did not notice until his daughter pointed it out.
On the morning, in a soft rain that stops and starts, he leaves the car by the memorial and walks up through the townships, past the crofts, to where the ground steepens. The kilt is cooler than he expected on the climb and warmer than he expected at the top, where the wind comes in off the Sound of Raasay. From the summit of Ben Lee he can see the whole of the Braes below him, the crofts, the road, the narrow place between the rock and the shore.
He takes out his phone and calls his mother in Brisbane, where it is evening.
“I’m on the hill,” he says. “The one they fought for.”
“In the kilt?”
“In the kilt. It’s raining. It’s brown and green and purple, and there’s a grey line in it for the mist, and I’m standing in the mist.” He looks down at the road. “Mum, it’s about sixty yards wide down there. That’s where they did it. With stones.”
The line for the mist
The crofters of the Braes were not soldiers. They were people who had grazed a hill for as long as anyone could remember and were told they could not, and they picked up what was lying about and said no. The law changed because of them, slowly, and the crofts they fought for are still crofts.
The tartan came a century later, from a woman whose family had left, and it carries the island in its colours: the moor, the crofts, the heather, and a single grey line that could be mist, or could be the memory of a morning in April when the hill was full of people who would not move.
