MacLeod of Lewis (Vestiarium Scoticum)
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 KGKGR.
Part of the MacLeod of Lewis tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 5 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=2640
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1842 — MacLeod of Lewis (Vestiarium Scoticum) (register-of-tartans, record)
Also known as MacLeod Dress and sometimes jokingly referred to as 'Loud MacLeod' but Sir Thomas Dick Lauder obviously liked it. In a letter to Sir Walter Scott in 1829 he wrote, 'MacLeod has got a sketch of this splendid tartan, three black stryps upon ain yellow fylde.' Apparently MacLeod was a special friend of the Hays/Stuarts/Sobieskis and one of the brothers gave him the sketch many years before the Vestiarium Scoticum was published. Robert Bain was said to have illustrated it with four red lines but there is no evidence of this in his book 'The Clans & Tartans of Scotland'. - undated — MacLeod of Lewis (weddslist, record)
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
- 1842 (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: 2640
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 1272
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 1272
Thread count
K/32 Y4 K32 Y48 R/4
One full sett is 204 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| 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/s5/k8y1k8y12r1~x4/