Raspberry tartan

Despite Dr A Mccormick’s goodbye to the topic of tartan (Letters, 28 August), may I query the supposition that the one-tartan-one-clan idea hardly predates the 19th century.

When in 1829 the marquess of Stafford bought the Mackay country from Lord Reay, his principal adviser (James Loch, of Strathnaver Clearances fame) launched a concerted effort to win popular acceptance of the new regime. He arranged for Lord Reay’s piper to be kitted out in Mackay tartan – you could buy it, he said, in a shop on Princes Street, clearly implying that by then a particular sett had been clearly recognised as identifying Lord Reay’s clan.

Indeed, the connection between the Mackays and that particular tartan had proceeded so far that when a polite disagreement arose as to whether the Mackay tartan contained a reddish stripe, an elderly clan gentlewoman (whose memory will have gone back at least to the 1790s) gave the suggestion an authoritative raspberry.

(SIR) WILLIAM MCKAY Mackenzie Gardens, Dornoch