MacColl 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 GRGRBRBRBRGRBR.
Part of the MacColl tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 14 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=878
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1797 The MacColl tartan was produced by Wilson's of Bannockburn in 1797 under the name of 'Bruce' later known as 'Old Bruce'. Some historical detective work is required to establish the earliest date for the MacColl tartan. The MacColls are a branch of the Clan Donald who settled around Loch Fyne. Some of the clan living in the Ballachulich area took protection from the Stewart of Appin. There is a strong similarity in the pattern structure of the 'Appin' and the MacColl design. Wilson took great care to produce genuine Highland tartans, but he was less concerned with the naming of them, suggesting that he had in fact produced a MacColl tartan with a mistaken identity.
5 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
- 1797 (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
R/24 DB2 R2 G16 R4 DB2 R2 DB6 R2 DB2 R24 G2 R2 G/8
One full sett is 164 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) |
| 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/s14/r12db1r1g8r2db1r1db3r1db1r12g1r1g4~x2/