Birse
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 KGKYBR.
Part of the Birse tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 6 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=265
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1957 — Birse (register-of-tartans, record)
James Cant records that this tartan was 'woven by T G Gordon, Glasgow, November 1957'. A note on Dalgety sample (STA collection) says 'Birse, Arbroath.' Sindex card suggests there is a sample in the MacGregor Hastie Collection, Scottish Tartan Society Archives. This sample comes from the MacGregor-Hastie collection which forms the basis of the cloth archive of the Scottish Tartans Society. Some of the samples, including this one, were unmarked. - pre 1957 — Birse (Name) (tartans-authority, record)
Note with this threadcount in James Cant records says "Woven by T G Gordon, Glasgow, Nov. '57 "(1957). Sample in STA Johnston Collection and STA Dalgety Collection. Note on Dalgety sample just says 'Birse, Arbroath.' Sindex card says MacGregor Hastie Collection. Blue not quite right.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Register of Tartans
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/register-of-tartans/data.csv
- data date
- 1957 (this record)
- licence
- Crown copyright
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- Scottish Register of Tartans · Crown copyright
the living register — still published by National Records of Scotland - 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
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 265
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 1087
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 1087
Thread count
K/8 DG32 K28 LY6 T32 R/8
One full sett is 212 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
| T | #00879F #00879F | oklch(57.4% 0.102 216.1) |
| LY | #DCBC32 #DCBC32 | oklch(80.0% 0.150 95.2) |
| DG | #053819 #053819 | oklch(30.0% 0.075 151.3) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| Y | #789484 #789484 | oklch(64.0% 0.040 160.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
| LY | #F0C800 #F0C800 | oklch(84.3% 0.173 94.3) |
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/s6/k4dg16k14ly3t16r4~x2/