Clergy (Grey)
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 BWBKWKWBWBW.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 11 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=680
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/2002 — Clergy (Grey) (register-of-tartans, record)
It is reported that that in earlier times the Highland clergy wore the Highland dress and carried arms. It's also said that many attempts were made to prevent them wearing tartan and to force them to wear conventional ministerial habit. These, however, had only limited success. The SCALAN Catholic college in Glenlivet which operated in the late 1700s has reference in its 1780 accounts to buying tartan but of course there is no way of knowing if that was a plain tartan or the Clergy tartan as shown here since the word tartan was used for a type of cloth as well as for cloth woven with a tartan pattern. The Clergy tartan is sometimes called "The Priest's Sett", but in the Highlands is known as "Breacan nan Cleirach" - the tartan of the Clergy. As with so very many tartans, there are many variations of the Clergy sett, due to the vagaries of the illustrators of tartan books. There is no categorisation for occupational tartans so all the clergy tartans are classed as "Clan/Family". See 0039 for further notes. - pre 2002 — Clergy, Grey (Corporate) (tartans-authority, record)
It is reported that that in earlier times the Highland clergy wore the Highland dress and carried arms. It's also said that many attempts were made to prevent them wearing tartan and to force them to wear conventional ministerial habit. These, however, had only limited success. The SCALAN Catholic college in Glenlivet which operated in the late 1700s has reference in its 1780 accounts to buying tartan but of course there is no way of knowing if that was a plain tartan or the Clergy tartan as shown here since the word tartan was used for a type of cloth as well as for cloth woven with a tartan pattern. The Clergy tartan is sometimes called "The Priest's Sett", but in the Highlands is known as "Breacan nan Cleirach" - the tartan of the Clergy. As with so very many tartans, there are many variations of the Clergy sett, due to the vagaries of the illustrators of tartan books. There is no categorisation for occupational tartans so all the clergy tartans are classed as "Clan/Family". See 0039 for further notes.
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
- 2002 (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: 680
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 1312
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 1312
Thread count
N/2 LB2 N12 K12 LB2 K12 LB2 N4 LB2 N6 LB/2
One full sett is 112 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| N | #636363 #636363 | oklch(50.0% 0.000 89.9) |
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
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/n1lb1n6k6lb1k6lb1n2lb1n3lb1~x2/