MacArthur (Highland Society)
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 GYGKGK.
Part of the MacArthur tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 6 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=2280
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1815 — MacArthur (Highland Society) (register-of-tartans, record)
James MacArthur Moir of Milton (Chief of Clan MacArthur in 2005) has a portrait c1860 showing this sett. It is claimed that this double yellow-lined sett is in fact the original MacArthur, a sample of which is said to be in the Highland Society of London Collection (1815). Thus the modern single-lined version taken from Vestiarium Scoticum (1842) is possibly an erroneous version of the Highland Society sett. The Chief has decreed that both setts are regarded as genuine MacArthurs - although the single-lined version is still that promoted by the weavers. - 1815 — MacArthur (1815) (Clan) (tartans-authority, record)
Found in Highland Society of London records around 1990 and attended by much publicity about an "ancient" sett having been discovered, but "scholars" believed the error resulted from misreading the thread count. James MacArthur Moir of Milton ( now Chief of the Clan [2005] ) has a portrait C.1860 showing this sett. It's claimed that that this double yellow-lined sett, far from being an error, is in fact the original - a sample of which is said to be in the Highland Society of London Collection. Thus the modern single-lined version from Vestiarium Scoticum is more likely to be the erroneous version of the 1815 sett. The Chief has decreed that both setts are regarded as genuine MacArthurs although the single-lined version is still that promoted by the weavers. Info from www.clannarthur.com & members at Jan Trade Fair, Glasgow 2005.
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
- 1815 (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: 2280
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 959
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 959
Thread count
G/36 LY4 G36 K8 G4 K/30
One full sett is 170 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) |
| LY | #DCBC32 #DCBC32 | oklch(80.0% 0.150 95.2) |
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/s6/g18ly2g18k4g2k15~x2/