Cutty Sark

Cutty Sark is a British clipper ship. Built on the River Leven, Dumbarton, Scotland in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, she was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest, at the end of a long period of design development for this type of vessel, which ended as steamships took over their routes.

She was named after the fictional witch who wore only a short shift in Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter, first published in 1791. The witch Cutty Sark ran after Tam o' Shanter, who was fleeing on his horse, and caught the horse's tail at the Brig o' Doon. The name was an association between the speed of the fictional witch and that of the clipper ship.