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France v Scotland - Celebrating the Breton Tartans
This weekend sees Scotland travel to the Stade de France to take on the home team as they continue their valiant efforts in the Six Nations rugby series. Minus our local boy Stewart Hogg but fingers crossed on form to repeat their victory of last year. We have many Celtic connections with France and thought we would take this excuse to explore these a little further.
There are 14 Breton tartans, nine of these represent ancient areas in Brittany and their flags, and then there is the Brittany National tartan which represents the whole area with nine black and white checks representing each one.
"Bro" is the Breton word for area so each of the tartans is pre-fixed with this. Today Brittany is one of the 6 official Celtic nations of the world. Others include, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man and Britanny (or Breton) has many Celtic roots. The historic "Gaulois" people of France are actually Celts who migrated and stayed in France, with the word Celtae or Galates meaning "invader" in Latin, and it later became Gallie and finally Gaulois. The Celts fled from France following the Roman invasions. From the 5th century AD, a group of Briton people returned from Great Britain in order to flee their invaded homeland, settling in the Armorican Peninsula (what is now "Brittany").
So don your Breton tartan, and play your bagpipes, and let's hope the Scots are triumphant this weekend, and if not at least we know we can drown our sorrows in style with our Celtic cousins.
