Sporting heritage captured in cloth

Incorporating colours and patterns inspired by the surrounding landscape, estate tweeds are a perfect blend of practicality, exclusivity and tradition

- Written by Harry Wallop

SHOOTING can attract the flashier type: those who arrive by helicopter, who shoot with a Fabbri Titanium gun and wear £350 alpaca socks. But if you really want to impress your host — or indeed your guests — there's a classier way of showing off: turn up wearing your own estate tweed.

This is tweed you can't buy in a shop, even swanky ones in Mayfair. This is tweed that either you have inherited or has been designed very specifically for you and, usually, your Scottish estate. “This is bespoke, upon bespoke,” says Campbell Carey, 50, the creative director of Huntsman, one of Savile Row's smarter tailoring companies, which has dressed everyone from Edward VII and George V to Clark Gable and Brad Pitt. It is also famous for its tweed.

Carey, from Ayrshire, says: “I get clients who say: ‘I want you to make me something none of my buddies can have or get.’ Once you get to that level of wealth the term bespoke is just bandied about and becomes meaningless. However, a Huntsman suit made with your own estate tweed? That is extra, extra exclusivity.”

It certainly is. But it'll cost you: the Huntsman 'Tweed Experience' starts at £18,000, though alongside your bolt (60 metres) of unique tweed you do get a jacket thrown in.

Any good tailor will offer hundreds of different tweeds — from the famous Harris tweed, which has to be spun and woven on the Outer Hebrides, to Donegal tweed and Saxony tweed - all made slightly differently and all coming in a dizzying array of patterns and colours. But none of these are estate tweeds, which are the origin of most tweeds worn today.