Irish Kilt?

[jfraser]

I know it may seem strange to many Scots, but many Irish communities around the world regard the wearing of a sporran as a Scottish custom.

I have lived in four different countries, Ireland included, and I would say that many Irish communities regard the kilt as a Scottish custom.

[Joe I]

Anceint egyptians had kilts before the Scots

[Chas]

Anceint egyptians had kilts before the Scots

Just because the 'shendyt' wraps around the body does NOT make it a kilt.

Regards

Chas

[pugcasso]

All I know is that there are quite a number of nice Irish county tartans ... they are no doubt of rather recent invention but many of them look fabulous

Also I think I read that saffron colour cloth would be more yellow than the modern kilt colour but I like the modern saffron kilt (would be nice to get a kilt like that someday to represent my father's side more).

[O'Callaghan]

All I know is that there are quite a number of nice Irish county tartans ... they are no doubt of rather recent invention but many of them look fabulous

Also I think I read that saffron colour cloth would be more yellow than the modern kilt colour but I like the modern saffron kilt (would be nice to get a kilt like that someday to represent my father's side more).

There's a very simple explanation for the difference in saffron colour. As a plant dye, it does not produce the same colour on different fabrics, and the Irish leine was made of linen, which has notoriously poor dye takeup. So saffron + linen = yellow, and saffron + wool = brownish orangey colour (which actually has a name, it's called 'ruggy' [spelling?]). Of course, modern kilts are dyed with synthetic dyes, not saffron, and cheap ones are not even made of wool, but they approximate the colour of wool dyed with saffron, and if you see someone dressed in a leine to represent the ancient Irish it will be yellow, although it's not dyed with real saffron either, although hopefully it will be linen.

As for Irish tartans, they are all fairly recent, virtually all being 1960s or later, with just a few exceptions for certain family names (not Callaghan, which only dates to 2007!). County tartans only date back to the 1990s, although there are two for every county, as two separate mills invented their own ones. Marton Mills claim that theirs are based upon the colours taken from county crests, while House of Edgar don't try to explain where theirs come from.

My ancestors being from Cork, I have researched this and can say that (officially at least) only Cork City has a crest, not County Cork, and it has NO set colour scheme atall! However, the GAA, which regulates Gaelic Football and Hurling, has a pennant and a crest for each county, and for County Cork the GAA pennant is red and white, whilst the GAA crest is the Cork CITY crest portrayed in red, blue, green and yellow, which just happen to be the colours of the House of Edgar tartan for County Cork, which doesn't claim to be based upon a county crest. So where do Marton Mills get their colour scheme from? AFAIK it is taken from the version of the Cork City crest on the shirts of the Cork City Football Club (soccer)!

I don't know what you will find if you research the other counties, but you may expect to find similarly quixotic origins, if any, for the colours of the other county tartans.

[figheadair]

There's a very simple explanation for the difference in saffron colour. As a plant dye, it does not produce the same colour on different fabrics, and the Irish leine was made of linen, which has notoriously poor dye takeup. So saffron + linen = yellow, and saffron + wool = brownish orangey colour (which actually has a name, it's called 'ruggy' [spelling?]). Of course, modern kilts are dyed with synthetic dyes, not saffron, and cheap ones are not even made of wool, but they approximate the colour of wool dyed with saffron, and if you see someone dressed in a leine to represent the ancient Irish it will be yellow, although it's not dyed with real saffron either, although hopefully it will be linen.

I don't know the answer but I suspect that the tem 'saffron' in connection with the leine possibly dates to the period of the rise of Irish Nationalism and sources such as McClintock’s book. Apart from being very expensive Saffron is a foreign dyestuff and very unstable which is why any group of Buddhist monks will display a variety of shades in their robes which are re-dyed as they fade out. I agree that one or more shades of yellow, probably more brownish-orange than lemon would have been the norm for the leine and there are a host of native dye plants that could have been the source.

[Steve Ashton]

No one has yet mentioned that Saffron was (and still is in much of the world) the most expensive spice in the world. It has historically been traded for its weight in Gold.

Each Crocus flower produces only three stamens of Saffron. There are up to four flowers per plant. The plant cannot reproduce on its own so all Saffron plants are clones. Each stamen must be picked by hand.

During the time most of you are talking about it was grown in many parts of the world but was still very rare and very expensive.

[Friday]

There's a very simple explanation for the difference in saffron colour. As a plant dye, it does not produce the same colour on different fabrics, and the Irish leine was made of linen, which has notoriously poor dye takeup. So saffron + linen = yellow, and saffron + wool = brownish orangey colour (which actually has a name, it's called 'ruggy' [spelling?]). Of course, modern kilts are dyed with synthetic dyes, not saffron, and cheap ones are not even made of wool, but they approximate the colour of wool dyed with saffron, and if you see someone dressed in a leine to represent the ancient Irish it will be yellow, although it's not dyed with real saffron either, although hopefully it will be linen.

I wonder if there may be some confusion between Irish using saffron (from the Crocus) to dye and using local plants dyes to produce a yellow (saffron) color?

Here is an interesting article giving both sides of the question

Also see article A Few Arguments on the Subject of Saffron


An article in Wikipedia on natural plant dyes lists a number of natural materials and plants that will produce a yellow color.Could the linen been dyed yellow using local material and the color name "saffron" applied to that color yellow?

Also see:
Saffron-dyed Leine

[MacSpadger]

Could the linen been dyed yellow using local material and the color name "saffron" applied to that color yellow?

That's been the view for many years. As Steve has said, saffron is very expensive, it has a long history of being exclusively used by nobility. At times it has been the most expensive commodity in the world, more valuable then gold. A war has been fought over it, (helpfully called The Saffron War to remind us). You could be executed for possessing it, in Germany burnt alive. It was very, very rare in Europe, and very, very expensive. Ordinary people simply didn't ever use it.
The first references to saffron in Ireland came from French and Italian ambassadors who would have been no strangers to saffron. It's assumed that they saw saffron coloured clothing, so just decided it was saffron, as that's what they would have been familiar with. English visitors also used the term saffron, but, like the use of the term "warpipe", there are no pre "Celtic revival" references to saffron in any actual Irish writings. In Scotland it appears in written Gaelic text in 1703.

A clearer process is given by the English Jesuit priest known as Father Good, who was sent to Limerick circa 1556. In his eyewitness writings on Ireland he states "with the boughs, bark and leaves of poplar trees beaten together they dye their loose shirts of a saffron colour ". So; no saffron, according to Father Good, but poplar trees. However, he does use saffron as a name of a colour.

Dundee United play in orange shirts, but no-one seriously expects that they used real oranges to dye them. I think that over time saffron just became a descriptive name of a colour, until it was misunderstood during the revival period of the late 1800's, by which time saffron was not so rare.

It must also be mentioned that natural bog water, of which there is plenty in Ireland, can produce a saffron hued dye simply by steeping cloth in it.

[pugcasso]

It doesn't look pleated in the back ... I would think this should be a key defining variable in what makes a kilt...

It's *wrap* which is the family the kilt is also of.

Tons of peoples around the world had (and still have) knee-length (or a bit less or even more ... but knee-length and less implies ability to be unencumbered in mobility) wraps for men as the norm for most of human history (probably starting with some animal skin tied at the waist). I feel it is really neat walking around today wearing a clothing based on this ancient primary simple form of clothing idea .