MacNichol Clan Tartan
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern GRGRKBKRGRK.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 11 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=871
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1850 This plate is taken from the manuscript of William and Andrew Smith's 'Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland'. The Smith's sources included the findings of George Hunter, an Army clothier, who toured the Highlands in search of old tartans prior to 1822.
3 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1850 — MacNichol Clan Tartan (house-of-tartan, record)
- undated — MacNicol/Nicolson (W & A Smith) (register-of-tartans, record)
This threadcount is taken from the manuscript of W and A Smith 'Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland'. The Smith's sources included the findings of George Hunter, an Army clothier, who toured the Highlands in search of old tartans prior to 1822. - undated — MacNichol (weddslist, record)
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- House of Tartan
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
- data date
- 1850 (this record)
- licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- House of Tartan
the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 2691
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 871
Thread count
K/4 R16 G4 R16 K16 DB2 K8 R4 G24 R16 G/4
One full sett is 220 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s11/k2r8g2r8k8db1k4r2g12r8g2~x2/