MacAulay Tartan
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 KRGRGW.
Part of the MacAulay tartan — the named design grouping this sett with its other cloths.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 6 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=1164
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1881 This shorter version tallies with the count published by M'Intyre North in 1881 as having been given him by Logan. There are two Clans of the name associated with districts as far apart as Dumbarton and Lewis and they have no family connection with each other. They are the MacAulays of Ardencaple associated with the MacGregors and the MacAulays of Lewis who are associated with the MacLeods. This sett in its shortened form begins to resemble the MacGregor tartan.
3 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- House of Tartan
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
- data date
- 1881 (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
- House of Tartan
the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity - 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
Thread count
K/4 R32 G12 R6 G16 W/2
One full sett is 138 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) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
Sample pattern

Compared to the master
This cloth is one sett of its design; the master sett (the exemplar the design is anchored on) is below for comparison.
Its ΔTartan distance from the master is 0.30 — the same measure the nearest-tartans table ranks by (0 is identical; a re-scale of the same cloth is near 0, a recolour or a different proportion further).
this sett
master sett ★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/k2r16g6r3g8w1~x2/