Highland bagpipe with bellows

This instrument is a Great Highland Bagpipe fitted with bellows. Highland bagpipes with bellows were often used to play for dances and were called ‘reel pipes’. These were often smaller in size than the Great Highland Bagpipes, enabling the use of bellows. Alexander Glen, a bagpipe maker in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, offered two different sizes of reel pipes: ‘half size’ or ‘second size reel pipes’; both of these could be made as mouthblown pipes or as bellows pipes (Glen 1847 in Cheape 2008:23).

This set, however, seems to have the dimensions of full-sized Great Highland Bagpipes, marking it as an unusual set. Its good condition shows that it was not played much, and it was possibly a model that was not successful (Cheape 2023). Hugh Cheape suggests that the workmanship could be that of Alexander Glen from Edinburgh, who made bagpipes between 1833 and 1873. Glen was accustomed to making bellows-blown pipes, whether these were reel pipes, union pipes or ‘lowcountry’ pipes. Glen did not offer the bellows option for the larger Great Highland Pipes, which suggests that this instrument could either be a prototype or a special commission.



(Cassandre Balosso-Bardin, 2023)


References

Cheape, Hugh, 2008. Bagpipes, A national collection of a national instrument, Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland

Cheape, Hugh, 2023. Correspondence with Cassandre Balosso-Bardin, August 29, 2023, Instrument file #89.4.2530, Musical Instrument Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York