Nine Years in the Heather: Cluny Macpherson and the Grey Hunting Tartan

For nine years after the battle of Culloden, the most wanted man in the central Highlands lived within a few miles of his own front door, and the British Army could not find him.

His name was Ewen Macpherson of Cluny, chief of Clan Macpherson. He had brought six hundred of his clansmen out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 and marched with them to Derby and back. After the defeat his house at Cluny, in Badenoch, was burned to the ground by government troops. A reward of a thousand pounds was offered for him, which in the Highlands of 1746 was wealth beyond imagining. A detachment of soldiers was stationed in the district for years with no other duty than to catch him. The cloth now known as MacPherson Hunting tartan would later carry the same clan name into a very different kind of Highland tradition.

He never left. He lived in caves, in holes dug under the floors of his tenants’ houses, in a vault below a kinsman’s cottage. The most famous of his hiding places was a contraption on the side of Ben Alder, a two-storey hut woven from branches and moss into the face of a rocky thicket, invisible from below, which came to be called Cluny’s Cage. The fugitive Prince himself spent a week in it in September 1746, playing cards and eating Cluny’s venison, before word came that French ships were waiting on the west coast.

At least a hundred people, by the usual reckoning, knew at any given time where Cluny was. They were poor. Their chief’s lands had been forfeited and they were paying rent to the government. Not one of them ever said a word. In 1755 the Prince sent for him, and Cluny slipped away to France, where he died nine years later, still in exile.

Touch not the cat

The Macphersons belong to Badenoch, the high basin of the upper Spey between the Cairngorms and the Monadhliath, around Newtonmore, Kingussie and Laggan. The name means son of the parson, from a twelfth-century cleric named Muireach who is counted the founder of the line. They were one of the principal tribes of Clan Chattan, the great confederation of the Cat, and they share its badge and motto: a wildcat sitting up with its claws out, and the words Touch not the cat bot a glove. Bot means without. It is a warning.

They also possess a relic. The Black Chanter, the Feadan Dubh, is a bagpipe chanter said to have fallen from the sky during the clan battle on the North Inch of Perth in 1396. While it remains with the Macphersons, the story runs, the clan will prosper. It is kept today with Cluny’s other relics in the Clan Macpherson Museum at Newtonmore, which is as good a small museum as there is in the Highlands.

After Cluny’s death the estates were restored to his son, who built a new Cluny Castle. And in that castle, about a century after Culloden, something was found in a chest.

The old shawl

In 1850 two brothers named Smith, of Mauchline in Ayrshire, published a careful book called Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland. They had written to the chiefs for their authority, and the chief of the Macphersons gave them more than one pattern. Of one he told them a story, which they printed:

“This pattern, which, upon the Chief’s authority, we give as the Hunting MacPherson was made for the grandmother of the present representative of the family, from an old shawl or plaid, which had been preserved in Cluny Castle for some generations.”

So the hunting tartan is a copy, woven in the late eighteenth century for a lady of the house, of a piece of cloth that was already old when she had it copied. The tartan historian D. W. Stewart, writing in 1893, called it “the earliest known to have been worn by the clan,” and added that it was reputed to have been worn in two forms: with a white ground as the clan tartan, and with a grey ground for hunting.

Grey is what makes it remarkable. There is hardly another tartan like it. Broad bands of soft mid-grey, black and a clear blue follow one another across the cloth, and between each band and the next runs a fine line of red. Where most hunting tartans are green or brown, this one is the colour of a winter sky over the Cairngorms, or of the granite itself. It is sober and striking at the same time, and it looks as though it was designed last week.

Those searching for MacPherson Hunting tartan will usually find it listed with the clan’s other setts: the busy red clan tartan, and the white-ground dress tartan to which the grey one is twin. Retailers make them to order as kilts, skirts, waistcoats, sashes and scarves, or sell the cloth by the yard.

Newtonmore, the first Saturday in August

Every summer the Macphersons come home. The clan gathering at Newtonmore has been held since 1947. There is a march behind the pipes to the Highland games at the Eilan, a service, a visit to the museum to look at the Black Chanter, and on the Saturday night a ball.

Rory Macpherson is forty-eight and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. He has been to the gathering once before, twenty years ago with his father, who has since died. This year he has brought his son. He has also brought his father’s kilt, in the grey hunting tartan, which turned out after a little work on the straps to fit him.

The ball is black tie, and Rory has spent more time than he expected working out what that means for a man in a kilt. What he has concluded, and what he explained to his seventeen-year-old on the plane, is this. There is no separate garment called a formal kilt. The kilt you wear to the games with a tweed jacket is the kilt you wear to the ball. What changes is everything above the waistband, and it all starts with the shirt.

The evening jacket is the Prince Charlie, short and black with satin lapels and silver buttons, over a low-cut waistcoat. That combination leaves a great deal of shirt front on show, so the shirt has to be a proper one: a wing collar, or a good dress collar, made to take a bow tie, with a plain or pleated front. It also has to be cut differently from a business shirt. A kilt sits high, at the navel, on a thick waistband, and a shirt with a full body balloons over it. His father’s old dress shirt did exactly that. So he ordered two new ones from Scottish Kilt, whose formal shirts are cut for Highland wear: wing collars for a bow tie and a Prince Charlie, turndown collars for an Argyll, and cut close for a high kilt waistband. The wing collar for himself. The turndown, with a long black tie, for his son, who is wearing an Argyll jacket, the plainer of the two formal coats and the right choice for a young man at his first ball.

The grey tartan, he discovered, was made for this. Under the black jacket the grey goes silvery. The black bands in the cloth vanish into the jacket and the blue bands seem to float. The fine red lines are the only colour anywhere in the outfit, and he has picked them up with red flashes on charcoal hose. His sporran has a grey fur front and a chrome cantle. Everything metal is bright silver, the buttons, the buckle, the kilt pin with its sitting cat.

In the hall, under the portraits, there are two hundred Macphersons from eleven countries. An elderly lady from Kingussie, very upright, stops in front of Rory and looks at his kilt for a long moment.

“That’s an old one,” she says. “That was woven at Pitlochry. Whose was it?”

“My father’s. He got it for the gathering in 1979.”

“The hunting,” she says, approvingly. “From Lady Cluny’s shawl.” She looks at the boy. “Do you know about the shawl? And the Cage?”

“Dad told me on the plane,” says his son. “A hundred people knew where he was and nobody told.”

“For nine years,” she says. “With a thousand pounds on him, and them with nothing. You remember that, young man, when somebody tells you what Highlanders were like.” She pats the grey cloth of his father’s sleeve, by mistake or not, and moves on.

What was kept

Almost everything the Macphersons had in 1746 was burned, forfeited or lost. What survived was what people hid. They hid their chief, for nine years, on a mountainside. Somebody hid a bagpipe chanter. And somebody, at some point before any of this, folded an old grey plaid into a chest, where it lay until a lady of the house thought it handsome enough to have copied.

That copy is the cloth her descendants still wear to their grandest occasions, under black jackets and white shirt fronts, in a village hall in Badenoch on a summer night. It is sober, a little severe, and it does not give much away, which is a fair description of the people who made it and of the people who kept Cluny’s secret.