Excerpted from "Tartans and Kilts" by the Ulster-Scots Agency:

On April 28, 1956, the Coleraine Chronicle reported the discovery by a farm labourer of ragged clothing dug out of an earth bank on the farm of Mr William Dixon, in the townland of Flanders, near Dungiven, County Londonderry.

The find consisted of a woollen jacket or jerkin, a small portion of a mantle or cloak, trews or tartan trousers, and leather brogues. This was the style of clothing worn by men in those parts in the 16th or 17th century.

Archaeologists from the Ulster Museum were invited to analyse the discovery. A block of peat containing fragments of the clothing was examined.....revealing a high concentration of pine pollen. Scots pine had been introduced into Ireland in the 1600s. The likelihood was that the tartan cloth was at least that old.

The trews had been made up from tartan woven in the Donegal style, in strips varying in width and distance from each other. The remaining items were also subjected to rigorous analysis.

Audrey Henshall (Edinburgh's National Museum of Antiquities) concluded that while the mantle was Irish, the trews almost certainly originated in the Highlands. The logical explanation was that tartan cloth woven in Donegal had been exported to Scotland. There the material had been made into tartan trews, which was the fashion in the Highlands. These trews started off as clothing for some wealthy person. When they unearthed in the soil at Flanders townland, the trews were covered in patches. The large variety of materials used indicated that the trews had been passed from one person to another, adding to the mystery.

The textile expert supported the soil analysis, dating the find to between 1600 and 1650....



From "The Irish Wars 1485-1603" (Ospery Men-At-Arms #256):

Reconstruction of the Dungiven Costume, a set of clothes discovered in a bog in the 1960s and thought to date to c.1600, the period of Tyrone's rebellion. It was perhaps originally the property of his O'Cahan soldiers. The trousers are of a tartan cloth cut on the bias, while the jacket resembles that of Turlough Luineach O'Neill in Derricke's print. The semi-circular woollen mantle is 8 1/2 feet wide by 4 feet deep.



The photos are of the reconstructed Dungiven bog clothing at the Ulster Museum, Belfast.