Historian Fergus Cannan states that the Scots armies who fought in battles like Bannockburn, and Flodden Field would have looked very different to the way they have traditionally been depicted.

Instead of kilts, he said they wore saffron-coloured tunics called “leine croich” and used a range of ingredients to get the boldest possible colours.

“What the Scottish soldiers wore in the country’s greatest battles is an area that, up until now, has not been properly studied,” he said.

“A lot of historians quite rightly stated that the film Braveheart was not terribly accurate, but what they didn’t admit was that they didn’t have a clue what would be accurate.”

Mr Cannan, a military history specialist, who has traced his own roots back to Robert the Bruce, scoured original medieval eye-witness accounts, manuscripts, and tomb effigies.