Melville
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 KBKGWK.
Part of the Melville 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=2914
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1847 — Melville (register-of-tartans, record)
This is the correct sett for Melville with just one black line on the blue. See also #1050 and #5593 (original Scottish Tartans Authority references). Scottish Tartans Society notes: 'There is a sample in the Moy Hall collection (1848). This sett, also known as Oliphant and Melville, appears in one of Wilson's notebooks in 1847. It is mentioned in a letter dated June 1824 but without any means of identification. It is also to be found in the Scott Adie (London) collection and in the MacPherson Museum in Newtonmore. Wilson records the second pivot (between the white lines) as blue.' See also #5593 (original Scottish Tartans Authority reference) where the blue is shown as purple. Sample in Scottish Tartans Authority's Scarlett Collection. - pre 1847 — Melville (Clan) (tartans-authority, record)
This is said to be tthe correct sett for Melville with just one black line on the blue. This count comes from Jamie Scarlett's 1990 book "Tartan The Highland Textile" in which he writes: "A Wilson pattern of 1847 or thereabouts giving sixteen half setts to a width of 25 inches." This is the Oliphant tartan from the 1842 Vestiarium Scoticum with one black line on blue instead of two. Original Wilsons reference not available for checking and so it is unknown as to why this tartan languished in obscurity for over 200 years.
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
- 1847 (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: 2914
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 6328
Thread count
K/8 W4 G26 K26 B24 K/4
One full sett is 172 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| B | #466CC8 #466CC8 | oklch(55.1% 0.149 265.0) |
| 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/s6/k4w2g13k13b12k2~x2/