Scotland has more than 400 museums. For a country of 6 million people. With more than 3.5 million foreign tourists each year. Scotland has a lot of cultural icons. The most famous is probably the tartan cloth and the folklore associated to it. Not one of these 400 institutions is about tartan. 

However, 10 million pounds have now been allocated by the UK government to the creation of the future National Tartan Centre to be based in Stirling for an opening in 2025/2026. 

But far from being a new idea, tartan museums have existed before. Then have collapsed. Then before this new venture started in Spring 2022, 3 different proposals have failed to reach the government expectations. 

This communication aims at tracing back the multiple iterations of a tartan museum, at trying to explain the difficulties around it – despite obvious visitor interest – and will explore a long and large path to the recovery of the collections scattered around when the previous institutions collapsed and closed. 

Within this history of the idea of a tartan museography project across 5 decades, the paper will show the relationship between the country’s politics, the historiographical debates around tartan (from a fake invented tradition from Hobsbawm theory to nationalistic interests) and also the intimate and complex relationship between the idea of tartan and its symbolism and the people of Scotland, the UK and the Scottish diaspora.