Matheson 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 GRGBRGRGRGRGRGBRGRGRG.
Part of the Matheson tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 21 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=860
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1850 The design usually worn by Mathesons is given by Smith although earlier versions are recorded. McIan's drawing could be taken to represent either of the two red designs of which this is one. The Mathesons were involved with other clans who settled in Lochalsh, and in particular with the MacDonells of Glengarry and the MacKenzies of Kintail. The tartan has a design structure which relates to the Glengarry which dates at least to c.1816 when a sample was certified by the chief.
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
- 1850 (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
DG/16 R8 DG2 R2 DG2 R48 DB16 DG8 R2 DG2 R2 DG8 R16 DG2 R2 DG2 R2 DB16 DG16 R4 DG/8
One full sett is 344 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| DG | #053819 #053819 | oklch(30.0% 0.075 151.3) |
| 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 0.64 — 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/s21/dg8r4dg1r1dg1r24db8dg4r1dg1r1dg4r8dg1r1dg1r1db8dg8r2dg4~x2/