Logan's Scottish Gaël — the first published tartans

In 1831 James Logan published The Scotish Gaël; or, Celtic Manners, as Preserved Among the Highlanders — two volumes of antiquarian sweep covering arms, dress, music and language. Tucked into the appendix of volume II is something genuinely new: a Table of Clan Tartans, the first time the setts of tartans had ever been published. Fifty-four patterns, each recorded stripe by stripe.¹

A scale in eighths of an inch

Logan did not count threads. He measured cloth — "commencing at the edge of the cloth, the depth of the colours is stated throughout a square, on which the scale must be reversed … to the commencement". Each stripe is given as a depth in eighths of an inch, and the table was "perfected" with the assistance of Captain Mac Kenzie of Gruinard. A web of tartan, he notes, is two feet two inches wide, "at least within half an inch", so the scale holds regardless of the size of the pattern.

The table is honest about its limits. Logan inserted no fancy tartans, noted variations between families of the same name, and admitted that some colours "can scarcely admit of description" — the green of the Mac Kay tartan is light, and the reader is trusted to know. His colour vocabulary is pure names: red, green, black, blue, white, yellow, azure, purple, crimson, grey, orange, light and dark green — and two splendid obscurities, corbeau (a raven green-black) and smalt (cobalt-glass blue).

Reading the table again

We transcribed the whole table from a scan of the 1831 first edition — by eye, page by page, because no OCR survives contact with an 1831 fraction glyph — then cross-checked the colour sequences, hand-verified the ambiguous readings, and converted every sett to modern threadcount notation at 8 threads to the eighth-inch. That conversion factor is not a guess: the Scottish Register of Tartans' Abercrombie record turns out to be Logan's Abercrombie at exactly ×8, stripe for stripe.²

With all 54 setts in standard notation we matched them against the dictionary's 15,500 variants, comparing canonical full-repeat cycles so that differences of recording convention — half sett versus full square, half-width versus full-width pivots — cannot hide a real match.

What survived 195 years

• 7 setts match exactly — among them Buchanan, where the Register's own "Buchanan (Logan)" record agrees with our transcription thread for thread, and Urquhart, whose Register entry "Urquhart (Logan)" says it was "recorded in the scales given by James Logan in his book".
• 10 more are close (the same colour sequence, widths within a few percent) — including Hay, which the trade knows as "Hay or Leith"; Logan's own footnote already said "this rich tartan is claimed by the Leiths."
• 31 have corpus records that cite Logan by name but differ structurally — the fingerprint of later re-interpretation. The Register's "Gunn (Logan)" uses 6 where Logan printed 7, and black where Logan printed blue. Sutherland's entry is the Black Watch lineage: the corpus note reads "this sett is based on Logan's 'Sutherland' tartan".
• 7 have no structural trace at all — Cameron, Lamont, MacGillivray, MacPherson, MacQuarrie, Menzies, and the Duke of Sussex plate below. These are arguably the most valuable: 1831 recordings that the modern corpus has lost or never absorbed.

The Duke of Sussex plate

Facing the table sits a hand-coloured copper plate, drawn by Logan himself: a square of plaid at full size, with an engraved scale down the margin — the pattern "peculiar to himself" worn by Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex. Logan explains that it is worn for Inverness, from which the Duke held his earldom — so this is the Duke of Sussex's tartan as Earl of Inverness.³

Read from the plate's scale and painted squares, the half sett is:

R/28.5  G2.5  W3/4  G4  Y3/4  G3/4  Y3/4  R/7

— in threads (×8): R/228 G20 W6 G32 Y6 G6 Y6 R/56. A red ground in the grand manner, green blocks, and a fine yellow-green-yellow group beside the narrower red pivot. The dictionary does hold a "Duke of Sussex" sett, but it is a different, much simpler pattern — the plate's tartan has no counterpart in the modern record.

The tartans

Every sett from the book, with Logan's measurements converted to threads, and a link into the dictionary where a counterpart exists. "Corpus cites Logan" means the dictionary's record for that name names Logan as a source but disagrees with the book — usually a later smoothing of his counts.

The Clergy tartan closes the table under its Gaelic name, Breacan na'n Clerach — the plaid "popularly believed to have been used by the Druids and Culdees", woven in nothing but black, white and grey.

The data

The full extraction — page transcription, stitched setts, threadcounts, the named colour palette, and the match report — was done by the Tartan Dictionary. What is really nice that nigh on 200 years later the information is perfectly useful.