This is one of the more reasonable approaches to Great Bagpipe history I have seen. “The bagpipe, alongside the drum and the harp, shares the claim to being the oldest of musical instruments and attempts to establish a reasonable history have met with little success.” (From the Ulster-Scots agency site)
The antiquity of the Great Pipe seems to be a problem for many historians. Bagpipes are so old that they fell out of favor with the fashion minded upper classes very early on and so were not well chronicled in the written histories but they are found quite readily in the culture of the folk. … Read the entire article on Bagpipe history by Clicking Here