National dress
The Scots are famous for the kilt. But actually it was also worn by other Celts in Britain and parts of France. The Celts were the people who first lived in Britain. They spoke Gaelic. They now mostly live in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. But it is in Scotland that the kilt is most popular. It is the national costume.
A kilt today is a knee-length article of clothing. It has pleats at the back. Pleats are folds. The kilt is usually made of wool and has a tartan design - stripes of different sizes and colours.
Cloak to kilt
Nobody is really sure when the Scots first started wearing kilts. We do know that before the kilt there was the cloak. Scottish soldiers used it to protect themselves against the cold and the rain. The Scots live in what the English used to call the Highlands. The weather there was harsher than on the Lowlands.
The Highland cloak came to be known as the 'great kilt'. It's not clear when people started to wear the waist-to-knee version of today. But, at least by the 1740s, it had become popular, possibly as Scots started to do modern kinds of work. The great kilt was not convenient for a factory worker, for example.
