MacNab 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 GRGRGRRRRRGRG.
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=857
Provenance
Earliest known date: c.1816 The structure of the MacNab is identical with that of the Black Watch; but, by a translation of colours, the most subdued of tartans becomes one of the most striking. D.C.Stewart suggests looking at the pattern through a green filter to see the effect. James Logan recorded ths pattern in his book, 'The Scottish Gael' in 1831, despite receiving a different sett from the largest weaving company of the time, William Wilson and Company, Bannockburn. Wilson's MacNab survives as an alternative tartan for the clan. James Charles MacNab of MacNab, Wester Kilmany, Fife, was recognised as chief in 1970.
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
- c.1816 (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
G/16 R2 G2 R2 G2 R12 Ri16 R2 Ri16 R12 G14 R2 G/2
One full sett is 182 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| R | #A00048 #A00048 | oklch(45.4% 0.182 5.3) |
| R | #C80000 #C80000 | oklch(52.3% 0.215 29.2) |
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/g8r1g1r1g1r6ri8r1ri8r6g7r1g1x2r1807008-ri2109032/