Tartan on Tartan Dictionary

Threads of tradition — the Maasai shuka

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The dictionary holds a set of Masai Shuka artefact tartans — checks read from the woolly red blankets worn across Kenya and northern Tanzania. Our interest is the one this dictionary always has: the pattern and its lineage — how the tartan check's grammar met a much older Maasai colour tradition and combined into a genuinely new set of setts. Their story is not a Highland one, and it is worth telling properly. This retelling draws on Paukwa's KE Textiles series essay, Threads of Tradition: The Tale of the Maasai Shuka, and on the sources behind our own records, below.

The Baronage of Angus and Mearns — family tartans of 1856

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1856 David MacGregor Peter published The Baronage of Angus and Mearns: comprising the genealogy of three hundred and sixty families … being a guide to the tourist and heraldic artist — a county-by-county walk through the landed families of Angus and the Mearns, each article carrying arms, crest, motto, seat and anecdote. And, for thirty-eight of the families, a tartan: the sett spelled out stripe by stripe, exactly as James Logan had done twenty-five years earlier.¹

The Vindolanda Check

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A generation before the Falkirk cloth was stuffed into its coin-pot, there was already checked wool being worn on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. It comes from the fort of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall, and it is one of the earliest checked cloths to survive from Britain at all.

The find

Vindolanda's waterlogged early levels are a textile archive: the anaerobic mud under the first timber forts preserved leather, wood, writing-tablets and cloth that would have rotted anywhere drier. Among the woollens excavated there is a simple two-colour check, deposited in the fort's earliest levels, around AD 100 — a full century or so before the Falkirk hoard was buried. The textiles were published by J. P. Wild in the Vindolanda research reports, and the fleeces themselves were analysed by M. L. Ryder.¹²

The Walkers Shortbread Tartan

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Few tartans are seen by more people than the red one wrapped around a box of Walkers Shortbread — a Speyside biscuit, "established 1898", sold the world over in its tartan livery. In 2016 Walkers registered that packaging as a UK trade mark (UK00003180795), and the device shows the tartan plainly.

It is usually called Royal Stewart, but a glance at the cloth is enough to doubt that — the ground is right, but the green blocks are too large and there is no white overcheck. So the question for this post is the narrow, hands-on one: what is the sett?

The fine grid — a colour space sampled evenly

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A specifier book like Pantone or Munsell samples colour space unevenly — densely where its trade cares, thinly elsewhere — because it is a record of what people actually made. The Dictionary needs the opposite: a frame in which equal distance is equal perceived difference, filled evenly, so that "how far is this shade from that one" has a single honest answer. That frame is the fine grid.

What it is

Take OKLab — the perceptual colour space the colour list already uses — and simply fill it at one spacing in every direction:

The six-colour reference palette

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Dictionary names every pattern in a simplified six-colour vocabulary — white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, "the rest are shades of these six." These are not screen primaries (tartans are not woven in #FF0000); they are representative cloth shades, chosen to maximise discrimination — to keep the colour distinctions that genuinely separate one tartan from another and throw the rest away. This post re-anchors those six onto the fine grid and re-runs the experiment that picked them.

The Drummonds of Megginch Tartan Collection

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For two centuries the Drummonds of Megginch have worn one tartan, and for two centuries no two weavings of it have been quite the same. The collection held at Megginch Castle — a plaid, three kilts, a child's kilt, even a carpet — is the same design at different scales, in different dyes, at different states of fading. This post gathers the whole collection in one place: every artefact, every thread count, every shade we have measured, and a printable poster of the lot.

Logan's Scottish Gaël — the first published tartans

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1831 James Logan published The Scotish Gaël; or, Celtic Manners, as Preserved Among the Highlanders — two volumes of antiquarian sweep covering arms, dress, music and language. Tucked into the appendix of volume II is something genuinely new: a Table of Clan Tartans, the first time the setts of tartans had ever been published. Fifty-four patterns, each recorded stripe by stripe.¹

The Falkirk Tartan

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scotland's oldest surviving tartan is not a clan sett, is not dyed, and very nearly did not survive at all. It came out of the ground as a wad of cloth stuffed into the neck of a Roman money-pot.

The find

On 9 August 1933, workmen levelling ground near Falkirk — a short way from the Antonine Wall — broke into a buried Roman earthenware jar. Inside were close to two thousand silver denarii, a coin hoard whose latest coins date its burial to around AD 230, in the first half of the 3rd century. The cloth had been pushed into the mouth of the pot as a stopper, and that is the only reason a scrap of third-century wool survived to be found at all. Hoard and cloth are both now in the National Museum of Scotland.¹

The La Tène Tartan

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Centuries before the Falkirk sett — and in full colour where Falkirk makes do with undyed fleece — Iron Age Celts were already weaving the combination at the heart of countless later tartans: a dark blue ground crossed by a fine red check. The cloth that proves it came out of a salt mine in the Austrian Alps.

The Origins of Tartan

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"For the purposes of this Act, a tartan is a design which is capable of being woven consisting of two or more alternating coloured stripes which combine vertically and horizontally to form a repeated chequered pattern."

— Scottish Register of Tartans Act 2008, section 2¹

The Falkirk tartan — Scotland's oldest surviving check, 3rd century AD.

This is how the Scottish Parliament defined tartan when it set up the Scottish Register of Tartans. It is the end of a journey that begins in ancient Eurasia. This post follows that whole line: from the birth of weaving to its eventual flowering, much later, in Scotland into a joyful way of celebrating cultural and family identity.

The Tarim Tartan

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a piece of checked woollen cloth, woven on the rim of the Taklamakan desert about three thousand years ago, that looks unmistakably like tartan — the oldest surviving example of the 2/2-twill check tradition. Why that matters, and how the same weave reaches from Xinjiang to the Highlands, is the subject of the companion post, The Origins of Tartan. This post does the narrower, hands-on job: it takes the surviving Hami fragment, reads a sett from it, reconstructs the colours the burial bleached away — and sets my reading beside the other reconstructions people have made of the same cloth, because this is a guess, and guesses should be compared.

What is Tartan?

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Tartan or checked weaving pattern has ancient origins. Perhaps it came with the spread of the ancient Bronze age Celts from Austria and Turkey. To the East there may be a link to the Tarim Mummies as was popularised by Elizabeth Barber¹. This currently has got caught up in origin stories of the Han. Notable mummies are the tall, red-haired "Chärchän man" or the "Ur-David" (1000 BCE); who wore a red twill tunic and tartan leggings. Elizabeth Barber highlights the similarities between this and fragments recovered from salt mines associated with the Hallstatt culture.