Clan you believe it … a tartan blessing?

ever underestimate the American capacity for romantic reinvention. And if in that process the resulting product is well wide of the original, it in no way dulls the appetite to play fast and loose with other folk’s history.

In the latest excerpt from his book on Scotland’s global diaspora, To the Ends of the Earth, Professor Tom Devine tells of the weird “customs” that now surround the celebration of Scottishness in modern America. One such is the ceremony of “The Kirkin o’ the Tartan”. This, recounts Devine, was apparently coined by an immigrant Scottish minister in 1943 and led to the widespread practice “of bearing clan tartans into churches to be blessed, with great solemnity, as a token of the faith of our fathers”.

Not everyone thought it a good thing. One Canadian Scot suggested in 1957, “Any day we’ll be reading about the Blessin’ o’ the Haggis!” This, however, didn’t stop the ‘Kirkin o’ the Tartan’ from being enacted in open fields to emulate the conventicles of the Scottish covenanters – a group that had no regard for the clan culture Americans so revere.

How tame Americans must find our modern Highland games compared with the large paramilitary assemblies that Americans insist is a true rendition of the vernacular.