Twill on Tartan Dictionary

Weaving in software — making the cloth measure true

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every woven swatch in the Dictionary — the samples on the variant pages, the favicon, the background tiles, the patches on the print sheets — is woven in software, thread by thread. This is the story of how that weaving works, and of a calibration problem it turned out to have: the woven cloth measured darker than the dye it was woven from.

The loom, pulled apart

Tartan is a 2/2 twill: each warp (vertical) thread passes over two weft (horizontal) threads, then under two, and each row of weft advances the pattern by one thread. Woven at a few fat threads, with gaps left open so every crossing is visible, the software's loom looks like this:

The Vindolanda Check

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A generation before the Falkirk cloth was stuffed into its coin-pot, there was already checked wool being worn on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. It comes from the fort of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian's Wall, and it is one of the earliest checked cloths to survive from Britain at all.

The find

Vindolanda's waterlogged early levels are a textile archive: the anaerobic mud under the first timber forts preserved leather, wood, writing-tablets and cloth that would have rotted anywhere drier. Among the woollens excavated there is a simple two-colour check, deposited in the fort's earliest levels, around AD 100 — a full century or so before the Falkirk hoard was buried. The textiles were published by J. P. Wild in the Vindolanda research reports, and the fleeces themselves were analysed by M. L. Ryder.¹²

The Falkirk Tartan

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scotland's oldest surviving tartan is not a clan sett, is not dyed, and very nearly did not survive at all. It came out of the ground as a wad of cloth stuffed into the neck of a Roman money-pot.

The find

On 9 August 1933, workmen levelling ground near Falkirk — a short way from the Antonine Wall — broke into a buried Roman earthenware jar. Inside were close to two thousand silver denarii, a coin hoard whose latest coins date its burial to around AD 230, in the first half of the 3rd century. The cloth had been pushed into the mouth of the pot as a stopper, and that is the only reason a scrap of third-century wool survived to be found at all. Hoard and cloth are both now in the National Museum of Scotland.¹

The Origins of Tartan

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"For the purposes of this Act, a tartan is a design which is capable of being woven consisting of two or more alternating coloured stripes which combine vertically and horizontally to form a repeated chequered pattern."

— Scottish Register of Tartans Act 2008, section 2¹

The Falkirk tartan — Scotland's oldest surviving check, 3rd century AD.

This is how the Scottish Parliament defined tartan when it set up the Scottish Register of Tartans. It is the end of a journey that begins in ancient Eurasia. This post follows that whole line: from the birth of weaving to its eventual flowering, much later, in Scotland into a joyful way of celebrating cultural and family identity.