Balmoral (Old and Rare) Royal 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 RWKWBWBWKBWRW.
Part of the Balmoral tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
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=1300
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1893 The Balmoral tartan is not produced as an article of commerce. D.W.Stewart wrote in his book, 'Old and Rare Scottish Tartans' (1893), "Her Majesty the Queen has not only granted permission for its publication here, but has also graciously afforded information concerning its inception in the early years of the reign, when the sett was designed by the Prince Consort." The grey threads are flecked to give an impression of granite.
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
- 1893 (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
LB/9 R5 LB47 N13 K11 LB5 N5 LB5 N21 LB11 K5 LB5 R/5
One full sett is 280 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| N | #636363 #636363 | oklch(50.0% 0.000 89.9) |
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
| 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 0.74 — 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/lb9r5lb47n13k11lb5n5lb5n21lb11k5lb5r5/