Weaving Scotland’s history

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.