Honor Clerk

Weaving Scotland’s history

What messages are threaded through Alistair Moffat's Great Tapestry of Scotland - and Alexander McCall Smith's commentary?

A couple of years ago, while tracking down paintings for the Public Catalogue Foundation in the far north of Scotland, I had the chance to see a rarely displayed sequence of banners, created in 1993, telling the story of Earl Rognvald’s epic voyage to Jerusalem in 1151. Suspended between the pillars of the shadowy nave of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, the 14 huge paintings, the work of four different artists with words by George Mackay Brown, had an extraordinarily powerful and moving effect. The scale of the enterprise, the narrative, and the fact that it was the product of collaboration seemed to be as much a part of the success as the quality of the work itself. So when Alexander McCall Smith, in his introduction to The Great Tapestry of Scotland, describes an audience gripped by the display of 165 panels telling the story of Scotland, the work of more than 1,000 people, it has a certain resonance.

The tapestry is the brainchild of McCall Smith and springs from his admiration for an earlier sequence of embroideries telling the story of the Battle of Prestonpans.  ‘Why not,’ he asks, ‘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?’

Of course there is something else happening in Scotland on 18 September 2014 that is giving more than the Scots cause to look at both their past and their future, but perhaps the date for that was not fixed when the tapestry was conceived. He then recruited the writer Alistair Moffat to select the subjects and write the text, the artist Andrew Crummy to draw up the designs and Dorie Wilkie to ‘supervise and inspire’ the stitching.

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