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If you are signed up for Sisterhood’s Scotland tour for women, you are in for a treat. Most people think they know the story of
If you are signed up for Sisterhood’s Scotland tour for women, you are in for a treat. Most people think they know the story of
If you are signed up for Sisterhood’s Scotland tour for women, you are in for a treat.
Most people think they know the story of tartan. Ancient clan patterns, passed down for centuries, each family with its own colors woven into the wool since time immemorial. It’s a good story. It’s also, mostly, not true — and one of the most quietly powerful mornings on Sisterhood Travels’ 2027 Scotland & The Highlands trip is built around setting that record straight, alongside the Highland woman working to write tartan’s next chapter.
On June 18, 2027, the itinerary pauses for something different. By this point, the group has already passed Loch Ness, walked through Glencoe, and toured the ramparts of Cawdor Castle.
Today brings a visit to Prickly Thistle, an ethical Highland weaving mill. Sisterhood calls it a Women Supporting Women experience.
It’s a quieter stop than a castle ruin or a battlefield. It might end up being one of the most memorable.
Here’s the twist. The idea that each Scottish clan has always had its own distinct tartan is largely a 19th-century invention.
Before 1746, tartan was a regional product, not a family one. Weavers in different districts produced cloth in their own local patterns, using whatever dyes were available nearby. Designs varied by geography far more than by surname. There was no such thing yet as “your clan’s tartan.”
Then came Culloden. After the Jacobite defeat in 1746, the British government passed the Dress Act, banning Highland dress across Scotland. Tartan was very much included.
For 36 years, the everyday wearing of tartan in the Highlands was effectively suppressed. The weavers who had made their living from it lost much of their market almost overnight.
The clan-tartan connection most people believe today didn’t really take shape until around 1815. It’s credited largely to a weaving firm called William Wilson & Sons.
It was cemented in 1822, when King George IV made a state visit to Edinburgh, the first by a reigning monarch in nearly two centuries. Orchestrated by Sir Walter Scott, the visit turned tartan into a unifying symbol of Scottish identity. It encouraged Highland dress even among Lowlanders who’d never historically worn it.
The “ancient” clan tartan so many people associate with Scottish heritage today is, in large part, a story that’s only about two hundred years old.
It’s a fascinating twist. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that lands differently when you hear it in person, from a Highland woman standing in her own mill, than it does in a guidebook footnote.
Prickly Thistle is the only tartan weaving mill in the Scottish Highlands, and the first one built there in decades.
Its founder, Clare Campbell, didn’t come from textiles. She was born in Inverness in 1978, trained as a chartered accountant, married her childhood sweetheart, and raised two children while building a career supporting Highland businesses.
In 1998, just before Christmas, her family lost her younger brother Paul at 19 years old. By her own account, that loss changed how she understood the preciousness of time and purpose for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t until late 2015 that Clare found what she calls her “inner rebel with a cause.” Her mission: bring tartan weaving skills, and tartan storytelling, back to the region where it once belonged.
She had no background in manufacturing or weaving. What she had was a conviction that the Highlands, of all places, shouldn’t be absent from the story of its own most famous export.
In 2017, after crowdfunding campaigns and the considerable challenge of sourcing and restoring century-old looms from the Scottish Borders, Prickly Thistle opened its doors. Today it’s the first B Corp-certified weaving mill in Scotland, a recognition reserved for businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental responsibility.
The mill operates by what Clare calls its five threads of purpose: writing a new chapter for the story of tartan with the Highlands at its center, weaving genuine innovation into how the cloth is made, acting as custodians of a craft skill that could otherwise be lost, bringing real design integrity to every project, and holding Highland craftsmanship to an uncompromising standard.
It’s a small mill with an outsized sense of mission. That mission is rooted in who gets to tell tartan’s story, which is where the “Women Supporting Women” framing of this visit comes in.
What makes this stop different from most tartan mill visits is exactly what Sisterhood built the morning around: hearing tartan’s real history from a local Highland woman’s own perspective, not a plaque or an audio guide.
Prickly Thistle has built bespoke tartans for organizations centered on advancing women. One example is a design created for Investing Women, a Scottish organization supporting female entrepreneurs, with GPS coordinates and founding dates from across the country woven directly into the cloth’s pattern.
That’s the kind of detail that captures what this mill is actually about. Tartan here isn’t just heritage fabric. It’s a living, purposeful medium that can carry a message forward.
For the women on this trip, many of whom are traveling solo or reconnecting with themselves after a life transition, there’s an obvious resonance in Clare’s own story. She was a woman in her late 30s, with no relevant experience, who rebuilt her life’s direction around a purpose that mattered to her, in the region she’d always called home.
It’s not hard to see why Sisterhood chose to frame this stop the way they did.
After the mill, the day continues to the charming town of Pitlochry for independent exploring and lunch. From there, the group boards a high-speed train south to Edinburgh to begin the next chapter of the trip.
It’s a fitting rhythm: a morning of story and craft, an afternoon at your own pace, then arrival in Scotland’s historic capital.
Sisterhood Travels’ Scotland & The Highlands itinerary is full of grand, dramatic stops. Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness. The towering peaks of Glencoe. The solemn grounds of Culloden Battlefield. The sacred quiet of Iona Abbey.
Prickly Thistle is a different kind of stop entirely, smaller in scale but arguably just as rich in what it reveals about Scotland. Castles and battlefields tell you what happened to the Highlands. A morning at Prickly Thistle tells you what’s happening in the Highlands now, through the eyes of a woman actively rewriting one of its oldest stories.
It’s also simply a good match for the spirit of the trip itself. A group of women, many traveling without a partner, spending a morning with a Highland woman who bet everything on rebuilding something the region had lost.
That’s not a stretch of a theme. It’s the theme, just told through wool and thread instead of a lecture
Is Prickly Thistle a real, working tartan mill?
Yes. It’s the only tartan weaving mill in the Scottish Highlands, and the first one built there in decades. Founded in 2017 by Clare Campbell, it’s also the first B Corp-certified weaving mill in Scotland.
Is it true that clan tartans aren’t actually ancient?
Largely, yes. Before 1746, tartan patterns were regional rather than tied to specific clans. The strong clan-tartan association most people know today didn’t really take hold until the early 1800s, cemented by King George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh.
What does the “Women Supporting Women” experience actually involve?
The visit centers on hearing the true story of tartan directly from a Highland woman’s perspective at Prickly Thistle, along with learning how the mill is reimagining traditional textiles with a strong sense of purpose and integrity.
Where does this stop fall in the Scotland itinerary?
It takes place on day nine of the trip, the morning after visiting Cawdor Castle and Culloden Battlefield, and just before the group travels to Pitlochry and then on to Edinburgh by high-speed train.
Why does this stop matter for a women’s group trip specifically?
Clare Campbell’s own story, rebuilding her life’s direction in her late 30s, with no background in the field, around a mission rooted in her home region, reflects a lot of the same spirit that brings women to Sisterhood trips in the first place.
Not every unforgettable moment on a trip comes from a castle or a cliff-edge view. Sometimes it comes from standing in a small Highland mill, hearing a woman explain how the “ancient” fabric most people assume they understand is actually a much newer, much more human story than they realized, and watching her weave a new chapter of it herself.
See the full Scotland & The Highlands 2027 itinerary: Scotland & The Highlands 2027.
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