Muirhead (Clan)
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 GGGBGWGRGRW.
Sourced from tartans-authority. It is a 11 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=3099
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- pre 2002 — Muirhead (Clan) (tartans-authority, record)
No. 6001 is the correct sett of the original tartan named as 'Muirhead' and its threadcount came from Matt Newsome of the Tartans Museum in Franklin who took it from the woven article. The Muirhead website (www.clanmuirhead.com) shows a slightly different version of this 'original' sett where the yellow is centred on a darker brown square within the lighter brown. That's thought to be an error in recreating the 'ancient' sett by adapting/copying a modern weaving of the tartan (D C Dalgliesh of Selkirk) in its unfaded colours which was in itself inaccurate. That's the version shown here. Somehow an extra green block (G18) had been inserted into the threadcount in one area and a G3 omitted in another. The tartan came from the kilt outfit donated to the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, North Carolina on 16th October 2003 by Frances Swanson. The kilt had been seen back in the 1980s but had disappeared from sight and there was confusion over the count and the colours at the time. This erroneous version of the unfaded tartan shown here now seems to have been accepted as the clan tartan. The threadcount came from Phil Smith who took it from a Dalgiesh woven sample. - undated — Muirhead (register-of-tartans, record)
#6001 (original Scottish Tartans Authority reference) is the correct sett of the original tartan named as 'Muirhead' and its threadcount came from Matt Newsome of the Tartans Museum in Franklin who took it from the woven article. The Muirhead website (www.clanmuirhead.com) shows a slightly different version of this 'original' sett where the yellow is centred on a darker brown square within the lighter brown. That's thought to be an error in recreating the 'ancient' sett by adapting/copying a modern weaving of the tartan (D.C. Dalgliesh of Selkirk) in its unfaded colours which was in itself inaccurate. That's the version shown here. Somehow an extra green block (G18) had been inserted into the threadcount in one area and a G3 omitted in another. The tartan came from the kilt outfit donated to the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, North Carolina on 16th October 2003 by Frances Swanson. The kilt had been seen back in the 1980s but had disappeared from sight and there was confusion over the count and the colours at the time. This erroneous version of the unfaded tartan shown here now seems to have been accepted as the clan tartan. The threadcount came from Phil Smith who took it from a Dalgiesh woven sample.
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- Scottish Tartans Authority
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/tartans-authority/data.csv
- data date
- pre 2002 (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
- Scottish Tartans Authority
the heritage body's archive — its tartan-ferret record browser is retired (links repaired to the SRT, above) - 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: 4992
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 3099
Thread count
Y/6 DG28 G18 DB8 G16 W4 G24 R24 G4 R10 W/4
One full sett is 282 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| DB | #082077 #082077 | oklch(30.0% 0.149 265.1) |
| G | #408060 #408060 | oklch(54.8% 0.084 160.1) |
| DG | #006818 #006818 | oklch(45.0% 0.142 145.0) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
| Y | #8B6E00 #8B6E00 | oklch(55.1% 0.113 90.4) |
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/y3dg14g9db4g8w2g12r12g2r5w2x2dg1806142-g2203152/