Welcome. The Tartan Dictionary exists to support the living Scottish Celtic tartan tradition — to help you understand tartans, trace a family or clan tradition, and find your way to owning your own.
The Highland clans of the 1745 Memorial, each country tinted with its tartan; disc size is the men it could raise. Gold dashed line = the Highland Boundary.
Only the “naturall chieftenries” — the true clans whose followers were kinsmen. The great Lowland superiors (Perth, Atholl, Gordon) fade out, leaving the Highlands proper.
Centroids and setts are approximate (a first pass); territory polygons traced from the 1899 Clans of Scotland map, and a true date slider, are the next layer.
The clans of Scotland as the 1745 Memorial found them — each country shown in its own tartan, sized by the men it could raise, divided by the Highland Line. A first sketch: positions are approximate and a date slider is still to come.
Most catalogues identify a cloth by its name, or by the weaver's exact thread-count recipe. This dictionary works one level up, at the pattern — the design itself, set apart from precise counts and shades — so that the many weavings of one design, across centuries and mills, are recognised as a single design. The Drummond of Megginch tartan, told apart at last from the Wilson "New Grant" it was long confused with, is the worked example.
Ways in
- Explore by pattern — browse the tartans and the patterns that relate them.
- Trace a family tartan — find a family or clan and how its tartan has changed over the generations.
- Read the story — what tartan is, and where the tradition comes from.
This is an early site, and it is growing. On the way: an interactive explorer of the wider pattern world, and a public-good guide to weavers and makers so you can get your own — down to a kit to weave the oldest Scottish tartan of all.