Description

In September 2009, art expert James Knox, a trustee of The National Galleries of Scotland, beat two English based dealers at auction and paid £7,500 for eight of the original forty shields, each 69 cms high and 53 cms wide, found in an attic of Skelmorlie Castle, commissioned as trophies for The 13th Earl of Eglinton's three-day long Eglinton Tournament, a 'medieval re-enactment' of a jousting tournament, held at Kilwinning in August 1839.

The Eglinton Tournament, a re-enactment of a medieval joust and revel, was funded and organized by Archibald Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Eglinton and took place at Eglinton Castle, near Kilwinning in Ayrshire, on Friday August 30, 1839.

Described as 'a deliberate set piece of Romanticism, in the face of social progress' and, widely publicized and open to the public, it is largely remembered not for its spectacle but rather for the fact that it was rained out on the first day and local people even yet referring to excessively heavy rain as 'tournament rain'.