Celtic on Tartan Dictionary

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.