The history behind the Cowan tartan reaches back to the parish of Inveresk, near Musselburgh, where one of the darkest battles of the Rough Wooing was fought. On the morning of Saturday 10 September 1547, the Scottish army stood on the west bank of the River Esk, a mile inland from the sea at Musselburgh, in what everyone agreed was an excellent position.
The river was in front of them, crossed by one narrow bridge. Marshy ground covered their left. On their right the ground rose to the church of Inveresk, on its hill where the Romans had once had a fort, and beyond that the land fell away to the Firth of Forth. They had cannon on the hill and a very large number of men, perhaps twenty thousand, most of them pikemen in close-packed blocks. The English, under the Duke of Somerset, had perhaps sixteen thousand, and were on the far side of the river with nowhere much to go.
Somerset had come north to enforce a marriage. Henry VIII, before he died, had wanted his son Edward to marry the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and had tried to arrange it by burning the Borders every summer for three years. The Scots called it the Rough Wooing. This was the biggest invasion yet.
Then the Earl of Arran, commanding the Scots, threw the position away. Nobody knows quite why. Perhaps he thought the English were retreating to their ships. Perhaps he simply lost his nerve at the thought of English guns on the ridge above him. He ordered the whole army forward, across the river, out of the marsh and off the hill, onto the open ground near a place called Pinkie Cleugh.
The guns from the sea
It was a disaster from the first hour. As the pike columns crossed the low ground beside the shore, the English fleet, anchored in the Forth, opened fire on their flank with heavy guns. Men on the left of the Scottish line were killed by cannon fire from ships. The English cavalry charged the pikes and were driven off with heavy loss, which was the one Scottish success of the day. Then the English artillery, arquebusiers and archers, safely out of reach, simply shot the packed blocks of Scots to pieces until they broke.
The pursuit ran for miles, back across the Esk and towards Edinburgh and Dalkeith. Estimates of the Scottish dead range from six thousand to more than double that. An English officer who wrote an account of the battle said the field was so thick with corpses that it looked, from the ridge, like a herd of cattle lying in a pasture. The Scots called the day Black Saturday. It was the last pitched battle between the two kingdoms’ national armies, and the Scots lost it worse than any before.
The marriage never happened. Within a year the Scots had smuggled their five-year-old queen to France, and Somerset’s wooing had achieved the opposite of what it intended.
The people of the parish
The church on the hill is still there, rebuilt in 1805 on the old site. Musselburgh, below it, calls itself the Honest Toun, and has a mile of racecourse, a golf links that claims to be the oldest in the world still in play, and a very old tradition of minding its own business.
Among the families of that parish were people called Cowan. The name is found all across the Lowlands, and there is no agreement about where it comes from. In one theory it is a shortened form of a Gaelic name, MacIlchomhghain, and in that form it is counted a sept of the Colquhouns of Loch Lomond. In another it is the Scots word cowan, meaning a builder of dry-stone walls, a mason who works without mortar. Freemasons still use the word for an outsider, someone who has picked up the trade without being admitted to the craft. A family called Cowan, in other words, might descend from Highlanders, from wall-builders, or from people who had learned something they were not supposed to know. All three are respectable origins.
For most of history the Cowans had no tartan of their own. Those who wanted one borrowed the Colquhoun. That changed in 1982, in Atlanta, Georgia.
A tartan from Georgia
The Scottish tartan registers record that in that year Robert Cowan of Atlanta, who described himself as the representer of the family of Cowan of Inveresk, in the parish of that name in Musselburgh, designed a family tartan and had it woven by the Lochcarron mills. A specimen was presented to the archive by a firm of kiltmakers in Perth at his request. The register adds, with proper care, that Cowans not connected with the Inveresk branch may wear the Colquhoun.
In practice the new sett has become the tartan that most Cowans reach for, because it is a good one. The ground is divided between a broad block of green and a broad block of dark blue, separated by black. A line of white crosses the green. A line of yellow and a line of red mark the pivots. It has the cool dark structure of a Highland tartan with a Lowland restraint about it.
Those looking for Cowan tartan will find it offered made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes, scarves and ties, or by the yard, in Modern and Ancient colours. There is something fitting in its origin. A family from a parish famous for a catastrophe on its doorstep got its tartan four hundred and thirty-five years later, from a descendant on the other side of the Atlantic, with no battle involved.
Musselburgh, a Saturday in September
Fiona Cowan is thirty-nine and runs a restaurant on the High Street in Musselburgh, four hundred yards from the Esk and about a mile from where the Scottish left wing was shot at from the sea. She grew up in the town. Her grandfather was a stonemason, which she regards as proof of the wall-builder theory.
Saturday is the busy night. She will be on her feet from four in the afternoon until one in the morning, running a pass, tasting sauces, talking to tables. What she wears for it has to do three things: look sharp for the front of house, survive the kitchen, and get her to the late ceilidh at the Brunton afterwards without going home to change.
For years the answer was black trousers. Two winters ago it became a skirt.
She had wanted something in the family tartan for the ceilidh side of her life, and she had it made: a scarf, and then a fitted shirt in the Cowan green and blue. But tartan in a kitchen is asking for trouble, and a tartan skirt on a restaurant floor gets a lot of sauce on it. What she needed below the waist was something plain, hard-wearing and wipeable. Leather.
She found what she wanted filed, slightly oddly, under kilt skirts on the Scottish Kilt website, the made-to-measure outfitter that had made her shirt. Alongside its tartan it makes women’s leather skirts in a range of cuts, and several of them are built on kilt lines: a wrap that crosses at the front the way a kilt’s aprons do, a mini with a panel of knife pleats, one that fastens at the hip with a row of buckled straps. They are made from full-grain leather, never bonded or coated, in mini, midi and pencil lengths, and cut to the customer’s own waist and hip measurements exactly.
That last part decided her. Leather does not forgive. A leather skirt a size too big stands away from the body, and one a size too small cannot be knelt in to reach a low oven. Made to her numbers, the black wrap pencil skirt she chose fits like a second skin, moves when she does, and wipes clean with a damp cloth at half past eleven.
Tonight she is wearing it with the Cowan tartan shirt, sleeves rolled, a plain black apron over both for service, black tights and flat black boots. When the last table has paid she takes off the apron, unrolls the sleeves, pins her grandmother’s silver brooch to the collar and walks up the road to the dance. The leather goes to a ceilidh as easily as it goes to a kitchen. The only pattern anywhere on her is the family’s green and blue, which is how she likes it.
At the ceilidh a man from Dalkeith, who teaches history, asks about the tartan.
“Cowan,” she says. “Cowan of Inveresk.”
“That’s a new one.”
“1982. A man in Atlanta. We had to wait a while.” She nods towards the window, and the dark fields beyond the town. “We were here in 1547, mind. Front row seats.”
Honest toun
Pinkie was fought over a wedding that never took place, by an army that abandoned a hill it should have stayed on. The people of the parish buried the dead, rebuilt, and went back to golf, racing and dry-stone walls. Four centuries later one of their descendants, a long way off, drew up a tartan in their name, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of cloth the town would have chosen: quiet, well made, and not looking for a fight.
It looks well over black leather, too, on a chef walking up the High Street at midnight with her sleeves rolled up, past the church on the hill.
