On the trail of Scotland’s textile treasures

Ten minutes later the elderly man in his garden seems less convinced. “No idea where that is love, can’t be anywhere near here though.” One u-turn, a bridge and three roads later the man with the black dog thinks he has the answer. “It’s not far from here. Just head for that big building, then go straight down the middle until you see the Lochcarron sign. You can’t miss it.” My husband closes the car window and lets out a sigh: “Can’t miss it? Third time lucky.”

It was, in fact, fourth time lucky. The man with the black dog inadvertently sent us to Lochcarron’s trade premises.

Eventually, though, we find our destination. Inside Lochcarron’s visitor centre a medley of brightly coloured tartans, tweeds and wools line the room while a wall-mounted TV displays catwalk shows the company has been involved in. It’s got exactly the sophisticated yet traditional image I’ve come to expect from our country’s modern textile industry, but then Lochcarron is one of the most successful fabric manufacturers in Scotland today.

Lochcarron supplies fabric to top international designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein among others, and their glossy-looking visitor centre reflects that. The company also operates daily tours of their Selkirk mill, but sadly we’ve arrived a little too late in the day to take part in any of those. (Probably due to my appalling map-reading skills).

Lochcarron is the poster company for the Borders textile industry. Their visitor centre is a five-star Scottish Tourist Board attraction and they manufacture and sell textiles, as well as garments, around the world. However they’re only one part of the story; one stop on our road trip.

Not all of Scotland’s textile producers are as well-known as Lochcarron and it was that thought -- the idea of trying to find our country’s current textile offerings -- that inspired me to put together my own Scottish textile trail. The sector employs around 9500 people across 642 businesses and has an annual turnover of around £750 million. I’ve been covering fashion-related stories for The Herald for more than five years and know many people who work with Scottish textiles, but it occurred to me that I didn’t have a sense of what the industry really looks like today.

Archive pictures of Pringle in its heyday are easy to find, but where are the big factories now? What do they look like and what are they producing? Pringle closed its Hawick factory in 2008 to great consternation, but other companies remain. I wanted to see for myself what visitors could see of this quintessentially Scottish industry. Would there be anything to see at all?

Textiles Scotland and Scottish Enterprise think so. “Our research shows that around 30,000 people visit Scotland every year just to visit textile attractions,” explains Hazel Brodie from Scottish Enterprise Textiles. “They apparently spend £200 each buying genuine, made-in-Scotland products.”

Two years ago Scottish Enterprise started working with the industry to try and create a more cohesive tourism strategy. A Visit Textile Scotland website was launched last year, which offers detailed information about the best attractions across the country, such as Johnstons Cashmere’s feted Elgin mill tour, or Harris Tweed’s island mills, or Begg Scotland’s visitor centre in Ayrshire.

I only had a day to complete my trail though, so it was decided that we should concentrate on one part of the country -- the area in and around the Borders. Arguably Scotland’s historical textile heartland, this reagion still produces tweeds, tartans, woollens and cashmere. New Lanark was our starting point. From there we would take the scenic A72 to Peebles, before heading on to Selkirk via the A707 and then finally to Hawick on the winding, tree-flanked A7.

New Lanark remains one of the most popular textile attractions, welcoming around 350,000 people every year. I hadn’t been there since I was a child, but the blonde-coloured mills and buttery smells I remembered were still there. Annie McLeod, the young mill worker who tells her story in the visual and audio show, still asks everyone to “never forget” about the workers who toiled there.

Nowadays New Lanark also operates as a partially working mill. Some of the old cotton machines have been transformed into a woollen production line, whose workings visitors watch before buying the wool at the end.

Customers also flock to buy the mill’s products online. “They sell wool in Scotland as well as overseas,” says Brodie. “They’ve hit the ground at the right time with a market taking off.”

Back in our less-than-clean, little black car and enthused by our experience at New Lanark, we continued down the A72 towards Biggar and onto Peebles, where Calzeat and Holland & Sherry are based.

It’s on this road, and indeed on all the roads on our journey, that you really get a sense of what the Borders textile industry was all about; what it is still about today. Sunshine-yellow and thistle-purple wild flowers pepper the undulating green landscape. Rivers -- the Tweed and the Teviot -- cut through the scenery again and again, while the grey road marks the only visible scar. It’s an inspiring place and one that has informed the choice of colours to dye the untreated cashmere and tweed yarns for hundreds of years.

Through the main street of the pretty town of Biggar, on past Skirling and then via some seriously photogenic countryside to Peebles, we stop for sustenance and a quick look around the old-fashioned main street. Holland & Sherry have their distribution centre in the town but there’s not much to see. Calzeat also has a small shop here, on the high street, but their head office is actually located in Biggar.

So it was back in the car (a rather unromantic-looking VW Polo, since you ask) and off to Selkirk where, as you know, we got well and truly lost on the way to Lochcarron. Fashionable clothing brand Lyle & Scott -- them of the yellow-and-black flying eagle motif -- also have their headquarters in Selkirk, not far from Lochcarron’s visitor centre, although there’s no obvious sign that it’s here.

Shona Sinclair, the curator at the Borders Textile Towerhouse museum in Hawick, believes the industry has changed in recent years. She says it’s become more niche, more focused and more discreet, which would explain why there are so few signs it exists.

“The industry has had to change and adapt,” Sinclair tells me. “It still exists, but it’s a hidden story now. One of our strap lines was -- and it was one of the things that first stuck me -- ‘want to hear one of Scotland’s best kept fashion secrets?’

“Some of these companies, they want to keep small and be quite dynamic -- they are working for the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, just in small runs. That’s the market nowadays, because they can’t complete with the Far East economies of scale -- and their lower wages.”

Sinclair’s thoughts make a lot of sense. I know dozens of textile companies exist in this area, but finding many of them is proving difficult. Sinclair believes this is because, in contrast with Pringle, which employed more than 3000 people in Hawick in its heyday and often received high-profile visits from Hollywood stars as well as royalty, Scotland’s present-day textile companies are smaller and less inclined to shout about their success. “For these companies it’s ‘Shhh, keep it quiet’,” says Sinclair. “A lot of them aren’t allowed to trumpet [their success with designer brands] around.

“Before the Textile Towerhouse was open, somebody would come into the museum and say: ‘I’ve heard Hawick is the Scottish capital of cashmere -- what is there to see?’ The person in the tourist office had to say, ‘Well, there’s nothing really.’ It was another reason to open the museum, to give it a focal point and a starting point.”

The Borders Textile Towerhouse, situated in the heart of Hawick town centre, is a great jumping off place for those interested in the industry. It turns out to be one of the most informative stops we make on our road trip. Its videos, hands-on exhibits (my husband spent a good ten minutes happily brushing, or carding, some raw wool) and a temporary Pringle of Scotland exhibition, offers an easy-to-digest overview of the industry both past and present.

It’s this Pringle exhibition, which includes old archive photographs and jumpers, that provokes the strongest reaction of the trip. It’s nostalgic -- deliberately so -- but I find it just a little bit sad. Pringle, I’m sure, wanted it to be a celebration of their Hawick-based heritage, but all I see is something wonderful that isn’t there any more.

The Hawick factory is gone, and although some of their garments are still made in Scotland by out-sourcing to other mills, the company don’t have that tangible link to the area any more. The Scotland in the Pringle of Scotland name seems that little bit more tenuous by the time I’ve left the building.

Determined to end this road trip on a high note, we decide to make Hawick Cashmere of Scotland’s modern visitor centre our last stop. Situated in a nondescript brown building next to the River Teviot, it doesn’t look much from the outside. From the inside, though, this place is textile heaven, where you can actually glimpse a modern company in action.

Hundreds of brightly coloured cashmere jumpers line the simple white shelves, while buttery soft scarves make neat lines on top of a central table. At the back of the room a large glass window allows visitors to see into the factory itself. Pale green metal machinery is being operated by skilled men and women, who are presumably used to working in this goldfish bowl environment.

Across the River Teviot, Johnstons Cashmere has a similar factory, which is filled with the same rainbow of cashmere garments, although it’s not currently open to the public. Then there’s knitwear firm Peter Scott, which, after a difficult few years when it went into adminstration and shed half its workforce is hoping to bounce back with new owners and a dedicated staff of 60. Suddenly Hawick still seems alive with the sounds of knitting and finishing machines.

I decide to throw caution -- and money -- to the wind and try on a classic cable-knit black cashmere jumper. It would seem wrong, I think while trying to justify the three figure expense, to make this trip and then not support the industry. So I do -- I decide to purchase the jumper. As the lady behind the white desk wraps it up for me we muse over Hawick’s textile heritage. “It’s sad,” she says. “Hawick used to be full of mills. Some of them are gone now, but there are still some here.”

She’s right, there are still mills here. Scottish textiles shouldn’t be relegated in our minds to antiquated “the way we were” museum exhibits. The industry, “Scotland’s best kept fashion secret”, is too alive for that. You just have to look a bit harder to find it.

See www.visittextilescotland.com.