Melville Family 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 BKBKGWKWGKB.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 11 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=1050
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1847 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.
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
- 1847 (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
DB/16 K4 DB24 K26 G26 W4 K8 W4 G26 K26 DB/8
One full sett is 320 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| 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/s11/db8k2db12k13g13w2k4w2g13k13db4~x2/