For many years Scotland turned its back on its Celtic past, he says, though that is changing. He sees the kilt as instrumental in this process.
“When Scots dress up in kilts and look at things like bagpipes they see it as being part of their Celtic background,” he says. “One of the things that intrigues me is that since the late 20th century there has been much more acceptance of tartanry. More and more people now expect to get dressed up in tartan.”
SNP leader Alex Salmond made the same point recently in a review of Allan Massie’s The Thistle And The Rose, a history of the long and fractious relationship between England and Scotland. Tartan, he opined, has been rescued from the ghetto in which Sir Walter Scott left it. It has been re-invented by fashion designers, accepted by youth culture and even used as a uniform by the Tartan Army, followers of Scotland’s benighted football team. “I attended a school dance in my constituency last year,” he continued. “Every lad was sporting tartan of varying degrees of outlandishness. If I had tried that at Linlithgow Academy in the 1970s I would have been beaten up in the toilets.”
Perhaps, then, the Celtic nation is actually a Kiltic nation and can be found at every wedding, birthday party, Hogmanay bash and international football match at which tartan is worn. It is then, a ceremonial nation.
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