Forbes 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 BKBKBKGKWKGKBKB.
Part of the Forbes tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 15 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=211
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1810-15 This is the Forbes in use today. It was said to have been designed by a Miss Forbes in 1822 for the Forbes family of Pitsligo but earlier records would appear to discount this story. It appeared in Wilson's pattern book of 1819, in Grant No: 15 and in Smith No: 47. A different sett has been approved by the Clan Chief and registered with Lord Lyon. It is known as Forbes Ancient.
3 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
- 1810-15 (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
DB/16 K2 DB4 K2 DB4 K12 G16 K2 W4 K2 G16 K12 DB16 K2 DB/4
One full sett is 208 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) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
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/s15/db8k1db2k1db2k6g8k1w2k1g8k6db8k1db2~x2/