The Great Tapestry of Scotland E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 221

Beschreibung

The brainchild of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, historian Alistair Moffat and artist Andrew Crummy, The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of thousands of years of Scottish history and achievement, from the end of the last Ice Age to Dolly the Sheep and Andy Murray's Wimbledon victory in 2013. This book tells the story of this unique undertaking from its original conception and creation by teams of dedicated stitchers to its grand unveiling at the Scottish Parliament in 2013, its subsequent touring and the creation of its permanent home in the Scottish Borders.

Leseprobe

The Great Tapestry of Scotland

Panel 1 stitched by:

KA Two

Linda McClarkin

Carol Whiteford

Stitched in:

Beith, Kilwinning

For all those who have worked on The Great Tapestry of Scotland

This eBook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Completed panels from The Great Tapestry of Scotland copyright © Great Scottish Tapestry Charitable Trust

Photographs copyright © Alex Hewitt Panel designs copyright © Andrew Crummy

Foreword © Alexander McCall Smith Introduction and other text © Alistair Moffat

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78027-160-6 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-656-4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

The Tapestries

PANEL 2 The Ceaseless Sea

PANEL 3a The Formation of Scotland

PANEL 3b The Collision

PANEL 4 Scotland Emerges from the Ice

PANEL 5 The Wildwood

PANEL 6 Tents and Tipis

PANEL 7 The First Farmers

PANEL 8 Brochs, Crannogs and Cairns

PANEL 9 Pytheas the Greek

PANEL 10 The Coming of the Legions

PANEL 11 Ninian at Whithorn

PANEL 12 Dalriada

PANEL 13 Cuthbert and the Gospels

PANEL 14 The Crosses and the Angles

PANEL 15 Dunnichen

PANEL 16 The Vikings

PANEL 17 Dumbarton Rock

PANEL 18 Constantine Climbs the Hill of Faith

PANEL 19 Carham

PANEL 20 King Macbeth

PANEL 21 St Margaret of Scotland

PANEL 22 The Flowers of the Borders

PANEL 23 David I and the Wool Trade

PANEL 24 St Andrews Cathedral

PANEL 25 Duns Scotus and the Schoolmen

PANEL 26 Somerled, Lord of the Isles

PANEL 27 Haakon at Kyleakin

PANEL 28 The Death of Alexander III

PANEL 29 William Wallace and Andrew Moray

PANEL 30 Bannockburn

PANEL 31 The Rain at Carlisle

PANEL 32 The Black Death

PANEL 33 The University of St Andrews

PANEL 34 The Ancient Universities

PANEL 35 Orkney, Shetland and Scotland

PANEL 36 Rosslyn Chapel

PANEL 37 Chepman and Myllar

PANEL 38 Blind Harry

PANEL 39 Waulking

PANEL 40 Flodden

PANEL 41 The Thrie Estaitis

PANEL 42 The Court of Session

PANEL 43 The Scottish Reformation

PANEL 44 Mary, Queen of Scots

PANEL 45 The Reivers and the Rescue of Kinmont Willie

PANEL 46 Robert Carey’s Great Ride

PANEL 47 The Making of the King James Bible

PANEL 48 The Dawn of the Ulster Scots

PANEL 49 Witches

PANEL 50 The National Covenant

PANEL 51 Droving

PANEL 52 Philiphaugh, 1645

PANEL 53 The Killing Times

PANEL 54 The Massacre at Glencoe, 1692

PANEL 55 The Bank of Scotland Founded

PANEL 56 The Darien Scheme

PANEL 57 The Act of Union, 1707

PANEL 58 The Jacobite Rising of 1715

PANEL 59 The Kilt

PANEL 60 The Jacobite Rising of 1745

PANEL 61 The Ordnance Survey

PANEL 62 English Advances, Gaelic Retreats

PANEL 63 The Royal and Ancient Golf Club

PANEL 64 The First School for Deaf and Dumb Children

PANEL 65 James Small and the Swing Plough, 1770

PANEL 66 Enlightenment Edinburgh

PANEL 67 Edinburgh’s New Town

PANEL 68 James Watt and the Steam Engine

PANEL 69 The Tobacco Lords

PANEL 70 Adam Smith

PANEL 71 David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

PANEL 72 The Highland and Lowland Clearances Gather Pace

PANEL 73 Weaving and Spinning

PANEL 74 James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth

PANEL 75 James Boswell and Smoked Fish

PANEL 76 The Forth and Clyde Canal, Burke and Hare

PANEL 77 Scotland and the Drive for Empire

PANEL 78 Robert Owen and New Lanark

PANEL 79 Robert Burns and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’

PANEL 80 The False Alarm

PANEL 81 Henry Raeburn

PANEL 82 Walter Scott

PANEL 83 Fingal’s Cave

PANEL 84 The Scotsman, Founded 1817

PANEL 85 George Smith and the Glenlivet

PANEL 86 Borders Tweed

PANEL 87 The Growth of Glasgow

PANEL 88 Sheep Shearing

PANEL 89 The First Reform Act

PANEL 90 Kirkpatrick Macmillan

PANEL 91 Queen Victoria at Balmoral

PANEL 92 The Scots in India

PANEL 93 The Disruption

PANEL 94 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

PANEL 95 The Railway Boom

PANEL 96 The Caithness School, 1851

PANEL 97 Fitba

PANEL 98 Irish Immigration after the Famine

PANEL 99 James Clerk Maxwell

PANEL 100 Scots in Africa

PANEL 101 Highland Games

PANEL 102 Scottish Rugby

PANEL 103 Shinty and Curling

PANEL 104 Scots in North America

PANEL 105 The Paisley Pattern

PANEL 106 The Battle of the Braes

PANEL 107 Mill Working

PANEL 108 Robert Louis Stevenson

PANEL 109 Workshop of the Empire

PANEL 110 The Scottish Trades Union Congress Forms

PANEL 111 Keir Hardie

PANEL 112 The Herring Girls

PANEL 113 The Discovery Sails from Dundee

PANEL 114 Dundee, Jute, Jam and Journalism

PANEL 115 Shetland, the Isbister Sisters

PANEL 116 Charles Rennie Mackintosh

PANEL 117 The Munros

PANEL 118 The 1914–1918 War

PANEL 119 The Building of HMS Hood, the Battle of Ypres 1917

PANEL 120 Elsie Inglis

PANEL 121 The Sinking of HMY Iolaire off Stornoway, 1919

PANEL 122 Eric Liddell

PANEL 123 Women Get the Vote

PANEL 124 Whaling

PANEL 125 The General Strike, 1926

PANEL 126 Fair Isle

PANEL 127 Hugh MacDiarmid

PANEL 128 Ramsay MacDonald and the Rise of the Labour Party

PANEL 129 The Great Depression

PANEL 130 Tenement Life

PANEL 131 The Second World War

PANEL 132 The Clydebank Blitz

PANEL 133 War Defences

PANEL 134 D-Day, 1944

PANEL 135 The First Edinburgh Festival

PANEL 136 East Kilbride and the New Towns

PANEL 137 The National Health Service

PANEL 138 Television Arrives

PANEL 139 The Washer Women

PANEL 140 Cumbernauld New Town

PANEL 141 North Sea Oil

PANEL 142 Aberdeen

PANEL 143 Linwood and the Hillman Imp

PANEL 144 Pop Music Booms

PANEL 145 Glenrothes

PANEL 146 The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders

PANEL 147 Stop Yer Ticklin’, Jock!

PANEL 148 The Rise of the Scottish National Party

PANEL 149 Scotland at the Movies

PANEL 150 Scotland’s World Cup in Argentina

PANEL 151 The Miners’ Strike

PANEL 152 Gaelic Resurgent

PANEL 153 Glasgow – European City of Culture

PANEL 154 Dolly the Sheep

PANEL 155 The Scottish Parliament Reconvenes, 1999

PANEL 156 AND 157 Parliament of the Ancestors, Parliament for the Future

Foreword

The tapestry illustrated in this book tells the story of Scotland. As one might imagine, to illustrate the history of a country, even with some 165 panels at one’s disposal, is no easy task. Nor is it easy to tell it in a way that brings centuries of a nation’s existence to life in an entertaining and vivid way. The Great Tapestry of Scotland does all this, and it does it in a way that was instantly recognised and appreciated by the public when it first went on show in the Scottish Parliament in the late summer of 2013. People came in their thousands – so many, in fact, that at times the building was thought to have reached capacity and faced the hitherto unthought-of possibility of being closed for a few hours.

I was part of the group of people behind the tapestry project, and I went to the opening with my heart in my mouth. What would the public judgement be on a project that had such large ambitions? Would people find fault with our selection of subjects? Would the artist’s style fail to resonate with the people of Scotland? I need not have worried for a moment on any of these scores. People stood before the tapestry with wonderment and delight on their faces. Some cried with emotion – the greatest tribute, I think, that any work of art can be given. I saw young children gazing at the panels with rapt attention. I saw elderly people recognise images and references and share them with each other with all the joy that goes with discovering something one has long known about but perhaps forgotten or not thought about for a long time. Everybody standing before the tapestry seemed transported by the experience.

The tapestry is the work of more than a thousand people from all over Scotland and beyond. The central artistic vision, though, is that of three people: Alistair Moffat, who selected the subject matter and wrote the text; Andrew Crummy, who drew the designs; and Dorie Wilkie, who supervised and inspired the stitching. All three made this object, but Andrew is the one who must be particularly celebrated as the artist. A man of great modesty, he never seeks praise, but it must be said here that he has, quite simply, wrought a masterpiece.

Then there are the many stitchers who have themselves put their own artistic stamp on the tapestry. Although Andrew designed the main images, he generously left a great deal of scope for individual stitchers to make their own contribution. And they have done so magnificently, adding numerous touches throughout, giving yet more life and colour to this lovely object.

When we started this project, which began with a telephone call I made to Andrew Crummy proposing that we do it, I had no idea that the result would be so lovely and so affecting. I had no idea, too, that in bringing the tapestry to completion so many people would be brought together in friendship. But that has all happened, and now the Scottish nation has something that it can treasure for many years – centuries, we hope – to remind us all of who we are and all the love, suffering, hope, disappointment, and triumph that makes up the life of a people. I hope, too, that we shall be able to share that with others from other nations, who will see the universal human story written on these panels of linen and perhaps reflect on the ideals of brother- and sisterhood that have always been so important in Scotland and remain so today.

Alexander McCall Smith

Introduction

On a summer afternoon in the 1890s, Donald MacIver drove his pony and trap up the track on the west side of Loch Roag on the Atlantic shore of the Isle of Lewis. A teacher at the school at Breascleit, he found himself completing the last stage of a long journey back into the past. Beside Donald sat an old man. His uncle, Domnhall Ban Crosd, had sailed across the ocean from Canada so that, before he died, he could at last return home. As Donald flicked the reins and the pony trotted up the rise at Miabhig, the vast panorama of the mighty Atlantic opened before them. Below spread the pale yellow sands of Uig at low tide and around the bay lay a scatter of townships.

His by-names hint at Domnhall Ban’s demeanour. Common enough when used to distinguish the owner of a frequently found name, ban means ‘fair headed’ but crosd is unusual – probably deriving from an English adjective, it is somewhere between ‘obstinate’ and ‘ill natured’. Perhaps the old man set a characteristic stone-face when he gazed on the heartbreakingly beautiful bay at Uig, the water glinting in the summer sun, a sparkle, a sight he had not beheld for fifty years, not since the white-sailed ships slipped over the horizon bound for a new life in Canada.

As Donald guided his pony gently over the rutted tracks, grass growing green on their crests, they came at last to journey’s end, the place Domnhall Ban Crosd had seen only in his dreams. It was the township of Carnais, his birthplace, where crofting families had been cleared off the land by the agents of an absent and uncaring aristocracy in 1851. Like many, Domnhall Ban and his people had found good and even prosperous lives in Canada but, in their hearts, there was ionndrainn. It means ‘something that is missing’, ‘an emptiness’, and, before he grew too old for a long sea voyage, the child of Carnais wanted to see his home place once more. But, when Donald pulled on the reins and braked the trap, there was nothing. Nothing at all to see. The croft houses had been tumbled down, the fences and fields opened to sheep pasture. What had been a busy, living landscape, home to the chatter of children and the day-in, day-out labour of farming families, had simply been obliterated. As he looked around at the desolation, the old man’s face at last crumpled and he wept, tears falling for all that experience in one place, all lost and gone, memories that would die with him. ‘Chaneil nith an seo mar a bha e, ach an ataireachd na mara,’ he said to his nephew – ‘There is nothing here now as it was, except for the surge of the sea.’

Much moved by his uncle’s sadness, Donald MacIver wrote his great lyric, ‘An Ataireachd Ard’. In memory of loss and change, of the wash of history over Scotland, it begins:

An ataireachd bhuan

Cluinn fuaim na h’ataireachd ard

That torunn a’chuain

Mar chualas leams’ e ’nam phaisd

Gun mhuthadh, gun truas

A’ sluaisreadh gainneimh na tragh’d

An ataireachd bhuan

Cluinn fuaim na h’ataireachd ard.

The ceaseless surge

Listen to the surge of the sea

The thunder of the ocean

As I heard it when I was a child

Without change, without pity

Breaking on the sands of the beach

The ceaseless surge

Listen to the surge of the sea.

The Great Tapestry of Scotland begins and ends with images of the ceaseless surge of the sea. The thunder of the ocean, its belly-hollowing elemental beauty is where our story of Scotland begins and it may well be where it ends, aeons into the future. But what made the rhythm and swirl of Donald MacIver’s words resonate was his uncle’s grief at the unflinching passage of time and the destruction of the way of life of ordinary people. And despite his tears, the old man’s instinctive understanding that it could not be other. Lying on the edge of beyond, the land of Scotland, the hard, ancient rocks of Lewisian gneiss, the old red sandstone and the shales and coal of the Midland Valley, endure but the story of the people who lived on its straths, in its river valleys and glens changes constantly and sometimes brutally.

No mere backdrop, Scotland is utterly singular. Most who see a photograph or a sequence on TV of a landscape without road signs or a familiar landmark can recognise it instantly and intuitively as a place in Scotland. Not sure exactly where but it’s definitely Scotland. There is a mixture of atmosphere, look and something very simple. The colours of Scotland are like no other and, above all, the Great Tapestry and its thousand makers have perfectly captured the blues, greens, reds, greys and browns of our distinctive geography.

The sorrow of Domnhall Ban Crosd is also characteristic. The old man did not weep for the passing of empires, the boasts of Ozymandias, he did not stand in the magnificent ruins of greatness, he wept for the scatter of once-snug cottage walls, for the passing of a way of life, for the body-warmth of a dying culture, the humanity of shared ills and privations, the clear and unambiguous sense of a community, the ghosts of people who would help each other when the waves crashed on Mangersta Head and storms blew in off the ocean. On that summer afternoon, Domnhall Ban knew that night had fallen on Carnais.

If those who look at its panels also listen closely to the Great Tapestry, they will hear something of what it sounds like, not only like the thunder of the ocean but also the distant march of armies, the jingle of harness, the roar of cannon and the echo of oratory. But much louder and more insistent will be the tread of ordinary people, the craic by the fireside, the whispers of hunters in the wildwood, the chatter of plough teams, the whistle of a shepherd, the clatter and rattle of mills, foundries and shipyards. And the singing, the waulking songs, the pawky melodies of Harry Lauder, the psalms, the keening and the grief. The sounds of a community, what Domnhall Ban knew at Carnais. But, despite the efforts of the powerful, the disengaged and outsiders, Scotland is still, just, a community, and a series of connected communities. Scots still believe in a collective sense of ourselves and that society should take responsibility for the old, the weak and the poor. Lest this sound like a manifesto, it should be pointed out that it is not a proposal for the future but an observation of what happened in the past – and in the present. The Great Tapestry is, after all, the creation of a community – the thousand stitchers who came together in groups to make it.

And, lest our sense of ourselves becomes self-congratulatory, the ceaseless surge of the sea and the ungraspable millions of years it took to form the geology of our nation remind us that the history of Scotland is but a speck bobbing on the ocean of time. Eleven thousand years may seem like an epic sweep but it is as nothing when the night sky is clear and the light of dead stars shines down on our tiny planet. And, being Scots, we should be further chastened by the knowledge that, if we have somehow managed to retain a worthwhile, workable sense of community, there were plenty of times when we behaved extremely badly and continue to.

The Great Tapestry of Scotland is, then, a people’s history of a people, made by a thousand of those people. That says much about its content, its cultural bent, but why exactly is it so beautiful, so evocative and how did it come into being?

Alexander McCall Smith is the simple answer to the last question. He made it happen. Having seen the remarkable Prestonpans Tapestry, a beautiful embroidered record of the battle fought near the town in 1745, Sandy was impressed not only with the panels and their design but also with the impact they had on those who looked at them. They were mesmerised. An idea leapt into Sandy’s head. Why not make a tapestry that tells all of Scotland’s story and do it for 2014, the Year of Homecoming, the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn? A tapestry of Scotland for Scotland’s year. The artistic inspiration behind the Prestonpans project was Andrew Crummy and, once Sergeant McCall Smith had recruited him, he called me. What should be in it? How should the narrative run? Would I write it? Within ten seconds, I was enlisted – Corporal Moffat, sir. Our platoon was completed when Dorie Wilkie, the wonderful Head Stitcher on the Prestonpans Tapestry, agreed to oversee the making of what we decided to call The Great Tapestry of Scotland. Gillian Harte became our excellent administrator and, finally and vitally, Jan Rutherford and Anna Renz agreed to do the publicity and raise the funds needed. They did a superb job.

Now we needed an army, a thousand volunteer stitchers to transform my narrative and Andrew Crummy’s superb drawings into the tapestry. And, once the call went out, they enlisted within months. Groups of stitchers sat down all over Scotland, from Shetland to Galloway, and they began the hard, detailed, fiddly, inspiring work of making all come alive.

Principal amongst the pleasures of working on this unique project has been my collaboration with Andrew Crummy. In the best Scottish tradition, I kent his mother – the remarkable Helen Crummy who founded the Craigmillar Festival Society – and, with his passionate inherited interest in community arts, Andrew is certainly his mother’s son. From the outset, we agreed that if the tapestry was to speak clearly of Scotland, then it had to tell a story of our people, of all who lived here for all those who live here now.

What made collaboration a joy was Andrew’s abundant talent. He knows how to make bold statements, his drawing is absolutely assured and it proceeds from a clear grasp of the essential narrative. No messing about, arrow-straight to the point. The lyrical opening panel shows Andrew’s talent perfectly as sheep, fish and birds dance in the hair of the woman who looks up at the hand with the needle while, around her, the arms of others enfold scenes and objects of Scotland – standing stones, tenements, shipyards, books, musical instruments and a football. And, moving briskly through the picture plane, trains puff across viaducts, ships sail, fully rigged, to unknown destinations while an oil drilling platform is planted in the sea. It is nothing less than the singular, all-encompassing, wholly original work of a great artist.

Crucially, Andrew also understood what stitchers liked to stitch and his drawings deliberately involved them directly in the creative process, inviting them to add images, even alter the original. We both talked of Renaissance altarpieces and how painters appended predella panels below the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion or the Adoration of the Magi or whatever the main image was. In these, painters sometimes added street scenes, landscapes or a portrait of the donor and, by leaving spaces in the drawings, Andrew and I hoped that stitchers would take the initiative. And they did! We also hoped that each would attach an impresa and perhaps initials. And they did. They made it their own.

What further encouraged additional bits of history in each panel was geography. Not only did the tapestry have to tell a story of the Scots, it had to include as much of the land of Scotland as was feasible. Panels were set in the Northern Isles, the Highlands, the cities, the Hebrides, the Midland Valley, Galloway and the Borders. And then, very importantly, those linked to a particular area were usually sent to groups of stitchers who lived in the same area. And that process of matching was wonderfully fruitful.

The needs of a wide geographical spread did not inhibit my major task – what to include and what to exclude. Over the eleven millennia of our story, Scotland has changed enormously. Cities did not always exist and places now sparsely populated were once important. Before 3,000 BC, very few hunter-gatherers lived in the wildwood and it seems that the islands of the Atlantic coast supported a much larger proportion of the population than they do now. Before 1700, the vast majority of Scots lived in the countryside while after 1900 most had moved to the Lowland cities. Without bending the narrative out of shape, it was possible to locate Scotland’s story right across the nation.

Drama is naturally eye-catching and it would have been easy to arrange our past around a series of battles, wars, martyrdoms and coronations and the other familiar set pieces. And some did insist on inclusion. But, generally, it seemed better to talk of how change affected the many rather than leaders or elites of various sorts. For those who worked the land for generations, invasion and political change often meant the replacement of one set of masters with another. The great problem is silence. Written records usually noted the doings of the mighty, the notorious and the saintly – and rarely have anything to say about ordinary people. Andrew and I therefore decided to show something of the lives of the many with generic panels, images of people working, walking their lives under Scotland’s huge skies. These are simple and eloquent, needing little explanation.

Early Scotland is also – conventionally – a story of men. My own work in DNA studies and elsewhere has led me to believe that, in the millennia before the last two centuries, the status of women was little better than that of informal slavery. And so Andrew and I took every opportunity to include female figures, wherever figures were needed, both in the specific and generic panels. Clann-Nighean an Sgadain, the Hebridean Herring Girls who followed the fishing fleets in the 19th and early 20th centuries to gut and barrel the herring catch as it came ashore around Scotland’s ports, is a good example. We did not distort our national story to include women where they were not actors in events, but we recognised that always they were there, giving life to the nation, and we tried never to forget that.

Not that we would have been allowed to. Almost all of the stitchers are women and they would not have let us do anything less. That fact remains an absolutely determinant influence.

The completion of this epic project is also the end of an equally epic, long, emotional and unexpected journey. And the tapestry itself is unexpected. Two years ago, I had no idea that it would look like it does. The Great Tapestry of Scotland sparkles, glows and surprises. It is not only the work of Andrew Crummy, Dorie Wilkie and myself, inspired by Sandy McCall Smith, it is a unique expression – a history of a nation written and made by a thousand people.

Panel 158 stitched by:

The Red Lichties

Evelyn Chaplain

Bob Chaplain

Rena Freeburn

Janette Nairn

Eileen Shepherd

Alice Sim

Jessy Smart

Mary Stephen

Linda Walker

Margaret Wynne

Stitched in:

Inverkeilor, Arbroath

The Tapestries

Almost all of the images and the panels are easy to understand and some have text to help identify who is who and what is what. They also run in a broadly chronological order but what follows adds a context, the briefest summary of the story of Scotland, background music for this stunning procession of the past.

PANEL2    The Ceaseless Sea