Caledonia/MacPherson/Kidd/155/43??

[OC Richard]

Talk about going down the rabbit-hole...

An hour ago I saw a vintage kilt on Ebay said to be Royal Stewart. It obviously wasn't. I thought it was Caledonia.

But when I checked the Ebay kilt against two tartan books I found that the tartan-books agreed that the Ebay kilt was not Caledonia.

So then I Googled "Caledonia tartan" and all the images that came up matched the Ebay kilt! So why is the tartan that everyone is selling as Caledonia different than the tartan my two tartan-books say is Caledonia?

Here are the two tartans



I'm sure Peter has addressed this issue here or elsewhere, but variously-worded Google searches turned up nothing. (As I've mentioned I can't use the Search function on this site, all I get is an error message.)

Without Peter's 1819 Pattern Book to hand (my copy is out on loan) Googling turned up a number of similar tartans woven by Wilson's of Bannockburn including

#43
#155

#43 (above right) was nicknamed Kidd due to quantities of it being sold to a customer of that name, but was re-named MacPherson for the 1822 Royal visit. It's this tartan that the two tartan-books I grabbed this morning (Setts, and District Tartans) illustrates as Caledonia.

#155 (above left) is the nameless Wilson's tartan which is now sold as Caledonia. I read that it was Robert Bain who put forward the Caledonia title for #155, and indeed my copy of Bain's book illustrates #155 as Caledonia. (My copy is from 1976; the book has gone through numerous editions since first being published in 1938, so I don't know which edition was the first to illustrate #155 as Caledonia.)

I read online that there exists Wilson's correspondence from 1818 concerning #155 but I can't seem to access it.

Hopefully Peter will chime in and get this mess sorted!

(I will say that a Holy Grail kilt for me would be #155 in Wilson's colours, heavyweight, in a large sett-size.)