When we visited Johnston’s of Elgin earlier this year, their archive room was a pleasant surprise. As well as old cloth books and ledgers, it included a display on the history of tweed, and going through this with the archivist reminded me of all the pleasing details of the cloth I had absorbed years ago.  

Given many readers won’t be familiar with it, I thought it would be nice to use the display to revisit some of the more relevant points – they make you appreciate things like estate tweeds, shepherd checks and gun-club checks, putting them into context. I also find it charming how so many of the checks evolved from one pattern to the next, adding elements or changing colours.

The oldest pattern is the shepherd’s check, which was used for the ‘maud’ or plaid that workers wore for centuries. It’s a simple crossweave of dark and light squares, with the light being the creamy yellow of untreated wool, and the dark either a darker breed or the light one darkened with various natural dyes.

You can actually see echoes of it in our English Tweed coat, as the white, brown and black in there are the natural colours of the cheviot sheep, the same breed that was traditionally used in those old shepherd’s checks.

Above is the poet and novelist James Hogg, wearing a shepherd’s maud.

That basic pattern provided the basis in the nineteenth century for the first district check, or estate tweed. These were developed as Scotland became a popular destination during the Victorian era, and families renting estates developed them to uniform their staff. Unlike many Scottish families, these visitors had no link to a local tartan.

Janie Ellice designed the first when she wanted a uniform for her staff while renting the Invereshie side of Glen Feshie. She took the traditional shepherd’s check and added a scarlet overcheck, giving it the name Glen Feshie. 

Over the years the idea of creating a tweed for a particular estate proved a fruitful one, with hundreds gradually being designed and adopted on different estates. Johnston’s wove many of them, and they still publish a book that was first developed in 1968 by a member of family, detailing them all. 

A few years into this trend for estate tweeds, the most famous tailoring one was created – the Glen Urquhart. This had been woven locally for a while by an Elizabeth MacDougall, but became the official tweed for Balmacaan Estate in the Glen when the Countess of Seafield adopted it. (And yes, the estate is also where the coat comes from.)

This particular tweed went through a few different and high profile versions. 

Edward VII visited the estate when he was Prince of Wales and adapted his own version, in brown and cream. He later shrunk it down, creating the small-scale version we see today in tailoring. And Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, later added overchecks in red and blue (and made it particularly popular it in the US).

Today, a version without a coloured overcheck is usually referred to as a glen check, while one with an overcheck is known as a Prince of Wales. This is one part of the story I have specifically written before – when I had a suit made by Henry Poole in their version (a burgundy overcheck – top image above). 

Returning to the shepherd’s check pattern, one step on was Coigach tweed (pronounced ‘coo-yach’) which later became the Gun Club check. 

This was first woven by Johnstons in 1846. Its variation on the shepherd’s check was a pretty simple one – just turning the dark lines into two or more different colours. Estate tweeds often worked in this manner, creating small variations on each other. 

The Coigach was navy and brown (second image above), with the same cream colour as a shepherd’s check behind them. Other variations introduced other colours, but there is usually at least one dark, one medium and one light, to retain contrast. Often if there is a fourth colour it is used as a larger check, a windowpane. My Ciardi jacket isn’t a traditional gun club, but you see the use of an orange overcheck. 

The modern name for the check came when an American gun club created their own version in 1874. The dominance of that name today is probably partly down to the size of the US market, partly the fact that Coigach is so hard to pronounce…

The next real change in estate tweeds was created by the 12th Lord Lovat, who designed one based on the colours of flora around Loch Morar – primroses, bluebells, sand, bracken and birch. 

This was an homage to the landscape, but was also intended to be effective camouflage. The old shepherd’s checks had been pretty good in this regard, as their organic colours and small checks meant they blurred into the landscape. But Lord Lovat wanted to take it a step further, blending the colours into a single melange yarn – so there’s no real pattern, just a melange of colours.

The significant thing about this, at least from a menswear perspective, was that the lovat tweed birthed many of the browns and greens we now associate with country clothing. From a historical perspective, it was probably more significant that it became the forerunner for khaki uniforms in the the British military, with Scottish soldiers being the first to wear it instead of the normal bright red. And versions of khaki have been used by armies around the world since. 

I sometimes forget how history like this can affect the way you feel about clothing. 

A connection to the way it was used in the past gives clothing an immediate authenticity, which is nice. But it can also inform how you wear it – you think differently about urban vs rural colours, for example, when you learn about how they were developed for that environment.

Learning how to dress isn’t just about standing in front of a mirror and trying combinations. It’s also about the culture around the clothes, which informs how they work, what impression they have on others, and at some level also how they look to you. 

Thank you to Sarah Wilcock, the Archivist and Records Manager at Johnston’s, for her assistance and research.