XIV. LOGAN
MAC CALLUM.
Well-nigh forgotten and rarely encountered, save in the old pattern-book or in the tartan collector’s museum, this design is early, though its origin cannot be fixed with any certainty. It has been supplanted by a comparatively modern pattern, known commonly as the Malcolm but occasionally as the Mac Callum, which is the ancient form of the name. The new scheme has existed some forty or fifty years at least, as the Editor has received from a lady in Skye a specimen in a portion of a silk dress her family has owned for about that period without knowing the name of the tartan. In the collection of the Highland Society of London (1822), in that at Moy Hall, and in every other important repository of the kind, the Mac Callum as here illustrated is ranked, and the Malcolm is wanting. It its believed that the family, having lost trace of the old sett fifty or sixty years ago, had the modern design prepared from the recollection of old people in Argyllshire; but, as has frequently happened in similar circumstances, the recovery of the original design shows that considerable deviation had been made.
XV. MAC CALLUM
MACDONALD.
One of the most romantic stories associated with tartans is attached to the fragment now reproduced. In the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, is a collection of MSS. in ten black-edged volumes bearing the title of The Lyon in Mourning, the reference being to the misfortunes of the House of Stuart. Fastened to the inner sides of the boards are many relics of the pathetic experiences of Prince Charles during the interval between his defeat at Culloden and his escape to France. The documents were written and the mementoes gathered by Bishop Robert Forbes, an enthusiastic Jacobite. Under a scrap of tartan with a bit of red lining he has noted:—
The above are pieces of the outside and inside of that identical waistcoat which Macdonald of Kingsburgh gave to the Prince when he laid aside the woman’s clothes. The said waistcoat being too fine for a servant the Prince exchanged it with Malcolm Macleod. Malcolm, after parting with the Prince, and finding himself in danger of being seized, did hide the waistcoat in a cleft of a rock, where, upon his returning home in the beginning of September 1747, he found it all rotten to bits, except only as much as would serve to cover little more than one’s loof, and two buttons, all of which he was pleased to send to me. The waistcoat had lain more than a full year in the cleft of the rock, for Malcolm Macleod was made prisoner sometime in July 1746.