What is a sporran?

A sporran is the leather pouch that hangs on the front of your kilt and held in place by a belt and chain. It’s an important part of traditional Scottish highland dress and it’s always worn with the kilt. Why? Because when you’re wearing the kilt, where else are you going to put your cash, your wallet, your phone and your keys? And you don’t want bulges spoiling the line of your lovely evening jacket. That’s why you need a kilt sporran.

But which sporran are you going to wear? As we’re talking about Scottish highland dress, you won’t be surprised to know that there are five different types of sporran. But first, let’s take a look at the design of a sporran.

Sporran Design

A sporran is a stiff pouch made from leather and, depending on the type of sporran, hide, skin, fur and hair. Its dimensions, depending on the the type of sporran, are around 60cm by 40cm. The back and flap (or lid, as the sporran maker will call it) is cut from a single piece of leather; the front from a second piece. A leather gusset is then sewn to the back and stitched to the front. The back flap then bends around the top and is fastened to the front with a stud or clasp.

Most, but not all, sporrans also have tassels attached to the front. In a pure leather sporran, such as a ‘day sporran’, the tassels, usually 2 or 3, are threaded directly into the front piece. For more decorative sporrans, such as ‘dress’ or ‘semi-dress’ sporrans, the tassels, up to 6, are fixed with small decorative chains, which either hang straight or crossed from the front piece. Hair, wool or skin tassels are bound with pewter, chrome or silver heads before being connected to the chain.

In modern sporrans you’ll find the leather interior lined with soft suede. There might be a keyring which you can use to snap your keys to, and separate pockets for your credit cards and coins. Some even have a little pocket where you can slip in your mobile phone. As we’re fond of saying, a sporran is a wonderful thing!

Types of Sporrans

There are five main types of sporran:

• Day Sporran. A day sporran, or sometimes a casual or just a leather sporran, is very common and the one you’d wear, well, during the day. It’s made entirely from leather and is traditionally black, although it’s common now for the leather to be offered in different tints such as brown, tan or grey.  Being a simple day sporran, it is usually plain leather without adornments, but can sometimes might also have elaborate Celtic designs embossed on the lid, either etched by burning or – more common nowadays, from a laser. Sometimes the pattern will be in the form of small pewter or chrome studs.In many ways, the day sporran is the modern equivalent of the original sporran of old – a simple leather pouch made from three pieces of leather stitched together. The back of the sporran is nearly twice as long as the front of the sporran and curves over the front to form the flap, or lid, as it’s called by the sporran maker.
• Dress Sporran. The formal sporran. The one that you would wear to a big event, like a wedding. Unlike a day sporran, it doesn’t have a flap lid and opens from the top. The front of the dress sporran is usually made from hide, skin, or fur. The dress sporran also has a pewter or silver decoration around the top of the front called a cantle, which can be richly decorated and designed. The cantle has a stud in the top that’s used for holding the sporran open or for closing it. It is held closed by small strip of leather holding the front to the back and fastened with a stud.
• Semi-dress Sporran.  The in-between sporran. Wear it to a wedding or casually if you like. It is constructed like the day sporran, with the back of the sporran longer than the front and forming the flap or lid that encloses the sporran.  The lid is also richly decorated with badges, stud designs and embossed Celtic engravings. And like the dress sporran, it has a front made from hide, fur or skin, and has at least three tassels that hang from decorative straight or crossed chains.
• Animal Skin Sporran.  This kind of sporran is made from leather and animal fur. The fur is stitched to the front and the tassels, typically 2 or 3 are also made from the fur. Fur sporrans are available in fox, beaver, rabbit, musquash, lamb, coyote, highland cow and mink. There’s even a skunk sporran! Typically luxurious in feel, they’re a type of dress sporran and always feature a richly decorated cantle.An extension of the animal skin sporran is using the head of the animal as the flap. Sometimes called full mask sporrans, they’re available in musquash (muskrat) or fox (collected from road kill). Although not made with tassels, they’re used as dress sporrans.
• Horsehair Sporran. This is the big hairy sporran that the pipers in pipe bands around the world wear. Made, as the name suggests, from the hair of the tail of a horse, this sporran, still worn by Scottish army regiments, features a white front with long black tassels, which are also made from horse hair.Regiments still wearing them are the Royal Regiment of Scotland, the Scots Guards, and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. Each of these has its own distinctive design of horse hair sporran. Interestingly, the Royal Regiment of Scotland’s horse hair sporran sports only 2 tassels, while both the Scots Guards and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards both sport three.

History of Sporrans

The first sporrans were simple affairs, being a leather pouch, probably made from deerskin, closed with a drawstring and tied by a strap to the belt that held the feileadh-mhor or ‘great kilt’ in place. It was basically a purse that was worn with a kilt.

Similar pouches were once worn by people across Europe, but as these were replaced by pockets in trousers or by smaller wallets or purses that were kept inside pockets, in Scotland the sporran remained. After all, we still wear kilts. And no one’s yet invented a kilt with a pocket!

The name, sporran by the way, comes from the Scottish Gaelic word sporan meaning purse or wallet or kilt pouch.

Materials for Sporrans

At their heart, sporrans are simple affairs and are made from only a few materials.

• Leather. The base material for a sporran is leather. Some sporrans, like the day sporran, as we have seen, are made entirely of leather. Inside the sporran, the leather is often covered in suede.
• Metal. Pewter, chrome and silver (and gold if you can afford it) are used for the cantle in dress and regimental tartans. They are also used for the head of the tassel which is then fixed to the chain that holds the tassel to the sporran front. Stainless steel links are used as part of the leather strap that is used to tie the sporran around the waist.
• Animal Skins and Hides. Dress sporrans use hide, skin or fur for the front of the sporran and can even sometimes use the head of the animal. Fox heads and musquash heads are the common ones to look out for. (The fox heads are only collected from road kill and are consequently quite rare.) The front of a dress sporran was traditionally made from sealskin but this was banned in Europe in 2009 after a general regulation banning the use of seal products. However, the ban was amended in 2015 to allow for the traditional hunting of seals by the Inuit and seal skin can again be found on sporrans.
• Horsehair (from horse tails). As we have seen, horsehair is used extensively for regimental and pipe band sporrans. The hair, by the way, is not collected from dead horses. It is gathered by grooms at stables from combing of the horse’s tail, then checked for disease before being sent in long tubes to the sporran maker’s.

How to wear a Sporran

A sporran is worn around the waist and should sit in front of the groin, ie not too high and definitely not too low on the kilt. If you’re unsure, then a good way to gauge where the sporran should sit is to place the top of the sporran a hand’s width from the top of your kilt. If you feel that it’s bouncing around too much while you’re dancing the eightsome reel, then hoist it up a couple of strap holes while you’re on the dance floor. You can always let it down again. Or twist it around and hang it over your hip.

If you’re wearing a horsehair sporran, it is usually fixed so that the bottom of the sporran doesn’t extend beyond the hem of the kilt – although if you’ve seen some old photographs of Scottish soldiers in kilts wearing their regimental horsehair sporrans, you’ll see some extending well beyond the kilt hem!

Keep in mind that your sporran is at once practical and ornamental – it’s designed to be seen. And if it looks right and feels right, then it’s probably hanging right as well. Of course some sporrans are more ornamental than others, none more so than the horse hair sporrans worn by the Scottish regiments – and of course by pipe bands all round the world.

Use of Sporrans

Originally, sporrans were just doeskin pouches, held closed by a drawstring and hung from a belt that hung around the waist or over the shoulder. In the sporran, the wearer would keep stuff essential for the day. Food perhaps, a little money if he had any, ammunition if he had a gun. But not a knife. Knives were too long to be kept in sporrans and it would take way too long to retrieve it if it was needed quickly (that’s the reason why you see a knife (called a sgian dubh) protruding from men’s socks when they’re wearing the kilt. But that’s another story.

Now, in our sporrans, we carry stuff we normally carry in our pockets: our change, our credit cards, our wallets and, of course, our mobile phones.

Sporran Manufacture

A simple leather day sporran with no adornment will take a skilled craftsman around an hour and a half to make. An elaborate dress sporran, on the other hand, might take over a day to make. A horsehair sporran has six layers of hair from 11”-17” (28cm-43cm) long and it takes around 12 hours to arrange the layers for the sporran.