Sources on Tartan Dictionary

DC Dalgleish shade card

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

D. C. Dalgliesh's mill yarn colours — measured reference shades for the Selkirk mill's palette. Each record is one yarn the mill dyes; measured with a Nix Spectro 2 (M2 D65/10°) and snapped to the fine grid.

Provenance


Code	`dc-dalgleish-colours`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	colour / shade definitions
Records	2
Source	https://www.dcdalgliesh.co.uk/
Attribution	Colour definitions: D. C. Dalgliesh Ltd
Licence	TBD — confirm with D. C. Dalgliesh before wider use

Reference shades measured from cloth/definition scans for the Dictionary's supplier palette.

Editorial curation

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The hand-curated overlay: variant names/stories/dating, pattern notes, clan and family stories, hand-attested clan-variant links, and search aliases. Applied on top of every build.

Provenance


Code	`curation`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	editorial curation overlay
Records	5052
Source	—
Attribution	Tartan Dictionary editorial (tartandictionary.org)
Licence	CC BY-SA 4.0

Our own editorial text; share-alike with attribution.

House of Tartan

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A weaver/retailer's tartan database of woven setts.

Provenance


Code	`house-of-tartan`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	tartan setts (thread counts)
Records	2152
Source	http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/
Attribution	Data: House of Tartan, via thetartan/tartan-database (Levko Kravets, 2016-2017 snapshot)
Licence	CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Snapshot	https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database @ 5bf86c756693

Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives

Tartans from this source

A sample of the 2,100 tartans this source attests — the first 120, alphabetically. Each links to its sett page.

Ingles Buchan

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An independent Glasgow weaver's tartan catalogue (trading since 1795) — photographs of real woven cloth, mirrored with cmd/ibscrape. Setts are pending recovery from the photographs, so no variants are attested yet.

Provenance


Code	`inglesbuchan`
Status	pending — captured, setts not yet recovered
Kind	cloth photographs
Records	519
Source	https://inglesbuchan.com/tartan-finder
Attribution	Cloth photographs: Ingles Buchan (inglesbuchan.com)
Licence	All rights reserved (catalogue photographs)

Mirrored for research (image→threadcount recovery); photographs are not redistributed — the images directory is a local, gitignored cache.

Lochcarron shade card

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Lochcarron of Scotland's mill shade card — yarn references, colour names and reference shades, pending capture. Each record is one yarn the mill dyes; the ref is the mill's own catalogue number, the thing quoted on a custom order.

Provenance


Code	`lochcarron-colours`
Status	scaffold — schema defined, data not yet captured
Kind	colour / shade definitions
Records	20
Source	https://www.lochcarron.co.uk/
Attribution	Colour definitions: Lochcarron of Scotland
Licence	TBD — confirm with Lochcarron before capture

License posture unknown until the capture source is chosen (published shade card vs correspondence); record it here before the source goes active.

Logan, The Scottish Gaël (1831)

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

James Logan's 1831 survey of clan tartans — the earliest systematic published record of setts, recorded as stripe depths in eighths of an inch of cloth. 55 setts transcribed by hand from the first edition; the threadcounts are derived from the eighths, rendered at 8 threads per eighth. As the oldest source it owns the cloth it shares with later records; related tartans that adjusted Logan's counts are noted on each sett.

Our own research

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Setts we recorded first-hand from physical artefacts and primary sources — e.g. the Drummond of Megginch heirlooms and the Falkirk fragment.

Setts we recorded first-hand — the Falkirk fragment and the Drummond of Megginch heirlooms (the ΔTartan ground truth).

Provenance


Code	`research`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	tartan setts (thread counts)
Records	112
Source	—
Attribution	Tartan Dictionary research (tartandictionary.org)
Licence	CC BY-SA 4.0

Our own measurements and narratives; share-alike with attribution.

Paintings

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Catalogued paintings from galleries and collections that depict tartan cloth — dated primary witnesses to how a sett looked when painted. A single source spanning institutions (National Galleries of Scotland first): per-painting metadata in paintings.jsonl, each record naming its holding gallery and its own licence and attribution. The painted cloth's sett is recovered by a manual reading informed by internal/unweave (see research/painting-to-sett.md); the curated reading is folded into the generated /paintings/ pages. Setts pending recovery, so no variants are attested yet.

Peter, The Baronage of Angus and Mearns (1856)

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

David MacGregor Peter's 1856 genealogy of the families of Angus and the Mearns — 38 family articles carry a TARTAN entry giving the sett as stripe depths in eighths of an inch, Logan's method and colour vocabulary exactly. Transcribed by hand from the 500 ppi Internet Archive scan; the threadcounts are derived from the eighths at 8 threads per eighth (the Logan display calibration). A dated 1856 witness for family↔tartan links: some entries copy Logan 1831, others attest family setts recorded nowhere earlier.

Scottish Register of Tartans

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The official government register of tartans, maintained by National Records of Scotland — the statutory record a tartan is entered onto.

Provenance


Code	`register-of-tartans`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	tartan setts (thread counts)
Records	7427
Source	https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/
Attribution	Data: Scottish Register of Tartans (Crown copyright), via thetartan/tartan-database (Levko Kravets, 2016-2017 snapshot)
Licence	Crown copyright
Snapshot	https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database @ 5bf86c756693

Re-use free of charge in any format, acknowledging Crown copyright and the source document. The CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 terms apply to the intermediate thetartan/tartan-database capture only.

Scottish Register of Tartans (site mirror)

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Dated captures of tartanregister.gov.uk record pages — name, category, dates, registration notes and the rendered sett image per SRT ref. Numeric threadcounts are login-gated, so setts are pending recovery from the renders.

Provenance


Code	`registry`
Status	pending — captured, setts not yet recovered
Kind	cloth photographs
Records	9505
Source	https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/
Attribution	Data and images: Scottish Register of Tartans (tartanregister.gov.uk), Crown copyright
Licence	Crown copyright

See terms.json (captured 2026-06-05) for the scope split: post-2009 register text reusable with attribution; pre-2009 legacy text rests with the STA/STWR; images Crown copyright, fair-dealing reuse with attribution.

Scottish Tartans Authority

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Scottish Tartans Authority's reference collection — a heritage body holding one of the largest tartan archives.

This is now a historical source. The Authority's dataset — the International Tartan Index — was folded into the Scottish Register of Tartans at its 2009 launch, where a record's STA reference is the ITI number these records carry. The Authority's own record browser, the Tartan Ferret, has since been retired, so the original record links are dead: pages show them unlinked, with an Internet Archive copy where one exists. The Scottish Tartans Authority itself continues as a heritage charity.

Tartan Register colour definitions

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Scottish Register of Tartans' standard colour list — dye codes, colour names and reference shades as published in 'Tartan Register colours' (Aug 2023 edition; the Feb 2016 edition's dropped shades kept as superseded). Follows the STA colour-code conventions. (internal/shades/data/scottish-tartans-authority.json is the corpus-derived legend, not this.)

Provenance


Code	`str-colours`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	colour / shade definitions
Records	145
Source	https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/docs/Colour_shades.pdf
Attribution	Colour definitions: Scottish Register of Tartans
Licence	TBD — Scottish Register of Tartans publication (Crown body); likely Crown copyright/OGL, confirm before redistribution

Captured from the PDF 'Tartan Register colours' (author adiamond; Aug 2023 edition, with the Feb 2016 edition for the superseded tail). Colour values are facts (hex/RGB swatches); confirm the document's licence before republishing it verbatim.

Weddslist

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A privately compiled online tartan reference, cross-indexing setts from many sources.

Provenance


Code	`weddslist`
Status	active — contributes data to the build
Kind	tartan setts (thread counts)
Records	3397
Source	https://www.weddslist.com/tartans/
Attribution	Data: Weddslist, via thetartan/tartan-database (Levko Kravets, 2016-2017 snapshot)
Licence	CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Snapshot	https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database @ 5bf86c756693

Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives

Tartans from this source

A sample of the 2,975 tartans this source attests — the first 120, alphabetically. Each links to its sett page.

Wikipedia

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Claim-level captures from Wikipedia articles — each record pins an article revision and the specific claims (with quotes) drawn from it.

Provenance


Code	`wikipedia`
Status	scaffold — schema defined, data not yet captured
Kind	descriptive text
Records	1
Source	https://en.wikipedia.org/
Attribution	Text: Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0 (per-record article and revision)
Licence	CC BY-SA 4.0

Attribution per article; share-alike applies to derived text.