I grew up on the Isle of Skye and was dispatched at a shockingly young age to a spartan Scottish boarding school where on Sundays boys would dress in their family tartan to trot to church. It must have been a sight. Nobody’s kilt fitted them. The teens’ were like Westwood miniskirts. The ‘weans’ looked like the late Queen going for a walk around Balmoral. We cherished our sporrans like pets. Mine was a stuffed otter’s head, which had a large hole in one ear. Family lore said it was a casualty from a great-uncle in World War II. I suspect it may have been moths.
Historically, the sporran was a purse for holding objects of value in pre-pocket times. For any Scot, wearing a kilt without one is like eating soup with a fork: odd, mad, wrong. Our connection to them is visceral. Animal, even. Old sporrans are excellent repositories for stories as well as insects. ‘The Scottish boys at my school in Kent were allowed to wear their kilts on Sundays too,’ the sporran maker Monty Lewis tells me. Despite growing up in London, he was ‘adamant that I was Scottish’ and so a Stewart kilt was duly dug out from family friends; a small jacket completed the get-up. ‘There was something mysterious in the inside pocket,’ he recalls. ‘It turned out to be a mouse carcass.’
Undeterred, Monty became hooked on Caledonian dress. ‘There’s something genetic about the romantic obsession with Scotland in my family,’ Monty says. ‘My great-grandmother claimed to be a chieftain of the MacIntyre clan, but I’m not certain this was true as my research revealed she was born in America.’ He is the son of Annabel Lewis, founder of the London trimmings shop VV Rouleaux, and he recalls the joy of leaping into a paddling-pool-sized basket of ribbons wearing his Royal Stewart kilt – though ‘it’s hard to know whether I remember the memory or just the excellent photo,’ he confesses.
Today, Monty makes exquisite sporrans in the Lake District, close to the River Derwent on the border of the Medieval kingdoms of Strathclyde and Rheged. It might not be Scotland, but it is a land steeped in Celtic lore, and his creations are imbued with something weirder and wilder than the Victorian Balmorality one tends to associate with dress sporrans of polite pipe bands. They are beasts; beautiful creatures with luscious fur, bedecked with intriguing accoutrements. Leather, goat- and horsehair, silver, brass, horn, mother-of-pearl – the panoply of materials and skills that might go into one is riotous, and there is a Caractacus Potts energy to Monty’s world.
He studied design at Northumbria University – he is also a silversmith – and says he is ‘always trying to understand how something is made’. Home is a Cumbrian barn built in 1823, and his workshop is in a cobbled arch near where the carts would have been kept. ‘It’s where I have my workbench, my soldering hearth, my wax kettle and sanding and polishing stations,’ he says. ‘The dirty stuff. It’s open to the elements, so it can be cold in winter, but I wear lots of layers.’ The more delicate work of assembly and finishing takes place in his living room, where ‘there’s no danger of the hens trying to find somewhere to nest when your back’s turned’.
The landscape feeds Monty’s imagination, and his environment becomes his objects. He describes feeling connected to the Galloway cattle on the fells, whose hides form his sporran pouches. The wind rippling across pools of water while he is out fishing is an effect he has captured in a hammered-silver cantle. He has his eye on the burr of an old riverside oak: ‘When there’s a storm, I’ll try and get there first if it falls,’ he says.
He has inherited his mother’s penchant for historic ephemera. In his hands everything is an open mine for ideas about technique and effect. How was it made? What could it become? He picks out a rope from an old ship, which has inspired the weaving of silver wire destined to become a sporran belt in place of the standard leather. Ledgers from his grandfather’s wool mill aren’t just sentimental heirlooms; their engineered spines fascinate him more than the contents. ‘My eyes are always seeking,’ he says. ‘My mind is always archiving interesting stitching details that might come in handy.’
I seize the opportunity to ask whether a sporran’s value is derived from the body part covered. What does one need to measure? A well-worn laugh suggests this may be a familiar question. ‘Well, the broader the man, the bigger the sporran has to be in order to look right,’ Monty says. ‘But I don’t take measurements.’
For more about Monty Lewis, visit montylewis.uk
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
