Nicholson 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 BRGRBWKRGRGRB.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 13 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=498
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1845-7 Nothing
3 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1845 — Nicholson Clan Tartan (house-of-tartan, record)
- undated — Nicolson/MacNicol (register-of-tartans, record)
The earliest documented evidence of a Nicolson or MacNicol tartan is the drawing by McIan of a woman wearing a tartan shawl (1845-7). The illustrated tartan is not consistant and various interpretations are possible. The threadcount used here is taken from a sample in the Scottish Tartans Society collection which is similar but not identical to the count recorded by D.C. Stewart (1950). The four by four red squares can be seen in tartans associated with the MacLeods. See MacNicol. Scottish Tartans Society archive. - undated — Nicolson (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
- 1845 (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: 3139
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 498
Thread count
DB/4 R22 G4 R22 G42 R4 K18 LB4 DB22 R22 G4 R22 DB/4
One full sett is 380 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
| 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/s13/db2r11g2r11g21r2k9lb2db11r11g2r11db2~x2/