The Poet on the Sands: Burns the Exciseman, the Rosamond, and a Camouflage Kilt on the Solway

Before dawn on 29 February 1792, a party of excise officers and dragoons lay in the reeds and scrub along the Scottish shore of the Solway Firth, near the mouth of the Sark, watching a ship.

She was the Rosamond, a smuggling brig, and she had run aground on the sands at low water with a cargo of contraband and a crew who had no intention of giving it up. Smuggling on the Solway was an industry. The English shore was a mile or two across the water, the tides made a road across the sand twice a day, and half the parishes on both sides were in the business. The excise men had been watching the Rosamond for a day, waiting for the tide and for reinforcements. Now they had both. Among the excisemen in the reeds was a man whose name would one day be given to a tartan, the scarlet Burns tartan.

When the order came they waded out through the shallows, up to their waists in the February sea, towards the stranded ship, and the man at the head of the first party was the officer of excise for the district, who had lately moved to Dumfries from a failed farm at Ellisland and whose name was Robert Burns.

The gauger

Burns had joined the Excise in 1789 because farming had beaten him, and because a poet with a wife and children needs a salary. He was a good officer, by the reports of his superiors, and he hated the job, which involved measuring the barrels of every brewer, tanner and chandler in his district and riding two hundred miles a week to do it. He wrote a song about it, The Deil’s Awa wi’ th’ Exciseman, in which the whole town dances for joy at the devil carrying off the gauger, and he sang it, by tradition, to his colleagues while they waited in the reeds.

The account of what happened at the Rosamond comes from his first biographers, who had it from a fellow officer, and some of it has been doubted. What the excise records show is that the brig was seized that day and her cargo and fittings sold at auction in Dumfries a few weeks later. What the story adds is that Burns was first aboard with a pistol in his hand, and that at the auction he bought four of the ship’s small cannon, carronades, for three pounds, and sent them as a gift to the revolutionary Convention in Paris. They were stopped at Dover. The gesture nearly cost him his post, since the government did not employ excisemen who armed the French, and he spent the next months explaining to the Board that he was a loyal subject who had merely been carried away. He kept the job. He died four years later, at thirty-seven.

The whole episode is the poet in miniature: the sympathy with the smugglers, the duty done anyway, the wild political gesture, the scramble to survive it. Scotland has never quite decided whether to be embarrassed.

A tartan for a name that had none

Burns was a Lowlander and an Ayrshire farmer’s son, and he had no clan and no tartan and would have laughed at the idea of either. The name comes from the Scots for a stream, and the poet’s father spelled it Burnes. There is a suggestion in the records of a connection to the Campbells, through his family’s origins in the Mearns, but nothing to make a clan of it.

The tartans that carry his name came in the twentieth century, and the archives distinguish them. The one sold as Burns, the clan or family sett, is a red tartan with green, blue and yellow, and its pedigree is modest and honest: it was, the archives record, “discovered by Mackinlay at Messrs Forsyth,” a tartan collector finding it in the stock of an Edinburgh outfitter, and “probably dates between 1930 and 1950.” A second, the Burns Check, was made in 1959 for the bicentenary of the poet’s birth: a friend at The Scotsman asked an Edinburgh weaver to design a Robert Burns tartan, and after discussion they based it not on the Campbell but on the shepherd’s check, with an overcheck of hodden grey and a little green for the fields, and the Burns Federation accepted it on condition that the goods were made in Scotland. A Burns Heritage tartan followed.

The Burns family sett is the one most people mean, and it is a lively cloth: a scarlet ground with bands of green and a band of blue, crossed by fine yellow lines, bright enough for the poet’s own taste in waistcoats. Retailers offer Burns tartan made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes, scarves and ties, or by the yard, in Modern and Ancient colours, and it is worn by Burnses, Burnes and Bernes, and by a great many people who have no connection to the name beyond the twenty-fifth of January. Its owners wear it to the Supper; on the shore, the same people are more likely to be found in kilt camouflage.

The Solway merse, a Saturday in November

Iain Burns is forty-six, a joiner in Dumfries, a member of the Burns Howff Club, and a wildfowler, which is to say a man who spends the November dawns lying in the mud of the Solway merse below the town with a shotgun and a dog, waiting for the geese to come off the firth. It is the same shore. The Sark is ten miles down the coast. He has read the Rosamond story many times and considers it the best thing his namesake ever did.

He owns two kilts, and they do not meet. One is the Burns tartan, red and green and blue, which he wears to the Supper in January and to the Howff Club’s dinners and which has never seen mud. The other is the one he wears on the merse, and it is camouflage.

He came to it the way most outdoor men come to a kilt, by having his trousers soaked and his knees frozen one morning too many. A kilt on a foreshore is drier than trousers, because wet cloth swings clear of the leg instead of clinging to it, and it is quieter, because there is no seam to rub. What he needed was one that would lie flat in a hide, take a hard wash, and not show against the reeds.

He found it at Scottish Kilt, in a range the outfitter files under kilt camouflage, described as tactical and camouflage kilts in heavy pure cotton with cargo pockets, metal D rings and reinforced stitching, built for real outdoor use and made to measure. His is a field kilt in a brown and green woodland pattern, cut to his waist, hip and length like any of their kilts, sitting low on the hip with snaps and a strap. The cargo pockets take shells, a call and a flask. The D rings take the dog’s lead and a lanyard. He had it made an inch longer than the outfitter’s standard, to the top of his wellingtons, because on the merse the wind comes from below. The seams are double-stitched where a man lies on them for three hours, and the whole thing goes in the washing machine with the merse on it and comes out ready for the next tide.

He wears it with a waxed jacket, a wool base layer, thick socks and wellingtons, and lies in the reeds at half past six with the dog beside him and the light coming up grey over the firth, waiting.

The geese come at ten to seven, pinkfeet, a long skein out of the dark, and he takes one and the dog goes out for it, and afterwards he sits up on the merse in the camouflage kilt with a flask and thinks, as he does every November, about a man with a pistol wading out to a brig in February with the tide coming in.

“He’d have wanted this,” he says to the dog, meaning the kilt. “Lying in the reeds all night in his breeches. He’d have wanted a dry pair of knees.”

The dog, who has heard it before, says nothing.

The deil’s awa

Robert Burns spent the last seven years of his life measuring barrels and chasing smugglers, and he hated it and did it well, and the one morning it turned into an adventure he made a gesture that nearly ruined him. It is not the Burns of the shortbread tins. It is a better one, and the Solway, which has not changed much, is still the place to find him.

The tartan that bears his name is a modest find from a shop in the 1930s, red and green and blue, and it comes out once a year for the haggis. The kilt that does the work on the shore he waded out from is cotton and camouflage, with cargo pockets and a strap, and it lies in the reeds where the excisemen lay. The poet, who knew about wet knees, would have understood the arrangement.