MacDonald, Lord of The Isles (Artef)
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 GRGRK.
Part of the MacDonald of Sleat tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from tartans-authority. It is a 5 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=873
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1750 This is MacDonald of Sleat with an extra black overcheck.
7 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1750 — MacDonald, Lord of The Isles (Artef) (tartans-authority, record)
From the 1750 portrait of the MacDonald Boys by Jeramiah in Armadale Castle on the Isle of Skye. This original version used three colours - red, green and black. the black line was dropped - by mistake or design - in the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842 and from then on it has been woven as shown at #904 This is the MacDonald of Sleat with an extra black overcheck. Also known as MacCullough (#3339). Sample in STA Dalgety Collection. - 1750 — MacDonald of the Isles (Red) Portrait Tartan (house-of-tartan, record)
- 01/01/1845 — MacCullough (register-of-tartans, record)
The McCullough sett is the same as the MacDonald Lord of the Isles sett as illustrated in 'Costumes of the Clans' by the Sobieski Stuarts (1845). It is also very similar to the MacDonald of Sleat sett, with a black overcheck added. A sample is preserved in the Scottish Tartans Authority's Dalgety Collection. - 1845 — MacCullough (Clan) (tartans-authority, record)
McCullough is same as MacDonald Lord of the Isles (#873) as illustrated in Costumes of the Clans, published 1845 which is also the same as MacDonald of Sleat but with a black overcheck added. Sample in STA Dalgety Collection. - undated — MacDonald Lord of the Isles #2 (register-of-tartans, record)
This is MacDonald of Sleat with an extra black overcheck. Scottish Tartans Society archive. - undated — MacDonald, Lord of the Isles (weddslist, record)
- undated — MacDonald of Sleat (weddslist, record)
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
- 1750 (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: 5199
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 3339
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 873
Thread count
G/32 R10 G4 R36 K/4
One full sett is 136 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
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/s5/g16r5g2r18k2~x2/