I've played all my life in Pipe Bands and you wear whatever tartan the band uses. Many bands choose their tartans simply because they like the look of it.

Being an artist, for my own kilt I just choose a tartan I love. I don't care what name people call it.

Tartans originally were that way anyhow: weavers wove the most attractive designs they could come up with and no one at that time dreamed of giving the patterns any significance. Giving clan titles to various tarans at that time would be like us giving family names to the various patterns on the bottom of our shoes.

And this original attitude has returned full force in the Kilt Hire industry, with Scots favouring kilts in new "trade" tartans with obviously fanciful names like Spirit of Bannockburn and Auld Lang Syne.

Many of our "clan" tartans were originally just known by a number, or derived from military tartans, or invented by the Sobieskis, or taken from old Clan Chief portraits. (It goes like this: you take an old portrait of two MacDonalds who are wearing a half-dozen different tartans between them, you choose one of them and call it an official MacDonald tartan.)

And some of our tartans have been known by various names over the years, possibly none of them originally having any connection with the tartan.