MacDonald 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 BRBRBRKGRGRG.
Part of the MacDonald tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 12 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=419
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1810-15 This is oldest recorded version of the Clan sett. It varies slightly from those recorded by Logan, Smibert, Grant etc., but the motif is the same throughout. Of the nine independant branches of the Clan Donald, there are at least 27 different setts. It was not until 1947 that the MacDonalds again had a high chief, MacDhomnuill, who by tradition has the final word on the tartans of the clan. That right was granted to Alexander MacDonald of MacDonald whose son Godfrey is now the 8th Chief.
4 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
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
- 1810-15 (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
Thread count
DB/16 R2 DB4 R6 DB24 R2 K24 G24 R6 G4 R2 G/16
One full sett is 228 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
Compared to the master
This cloth is one sett of its design; the master sett (the exemplar the design is anchored on) is below for comparison.
Its ΔTartan distance from the master is 0.22 — the same measure the nearest-tartans table ranks by (0 is identical; a re-scale of the same cloth is near 0, a recolour or a different proportion further).
this sett
master sett ★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/s12/db8r1db2r3db12r1k12g12r3g2r1g8~x2/