History on Tartan Dictionary

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.