Gordon (Clan)
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 BKBKBKGGGKBKB.
Part of the Gordon tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from tartans-authority. It is a 13 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=223
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1793 — Gordon (Clan) (tartans-authority, record)
The Gordon tartan is the regimental tartan of the famous Gordon Highlanders and was selected by the Alexander, the 4th Duke from a choice of three submitted by William Forsyth, a weaver and outfitter from the town of Huntly. Forsyth wrote on 15th April 1793 "When I had the honour of communing with His Grace the Duke of Gordon, he was desirous to have patterns of the 42nd Regiment plaid with a small yellow stripe properly placed. I imagine the yellow stripes will appear very lively." A Gordon website claims that the Duke offered the other two Forsyth samples to Gordon Branch or Cadet Families. The Gordons of Hallhead and Esslemont selected the tartan with three yellow lines and the Gordon-Cumming of Altyre and Gordonstoun chose the tartan with two yellow lines. The earliest known date from a list compiled by D C Stewart from Wilsons of Bannockburn letters is 1798. - pre 2010 — Westgate (Corporate) (tartans-authority, record)
Assumed to be a school tartan from Marton Mills. It is in fact the 92nd Regiment tartan (#214) and would not have been accepted by the STA had Marton Mills attempted to register it.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Tartans Authority
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/tartans-authority/data.csv
- data date
- 1793 (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
- Scottish Tartans Authority
the heritage body's archive — its tartan-ferret record browser is retired (links repaired to the SRT, above) - 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: 6019
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 6019
Thread count
DB/46 K6 DB6 K6 DB6 K34 G44 Y8 G44 K34 DB44 K6 DB/6
One full sett is 528 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| Y | #8B6E00 #8B6E00 | oklch(55.1% 0.113 90.4) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
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 0.27 — 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/s13/db23k3db3k3db3k17g22y4g22k17db22k3db3~x2/