Merrilees
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 RKRWWW.
Sourced from register-of-tartans. It is a 6 stripe tartan.
Original link https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartanDetails.aspx?ref=2938
2 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 01/01/1829 — Merrilees (register-of-tartans, record)
An inversion of the Dress MacPherson (Stuart Davidson). Was being produced in 1829 as a fashion tartan named 'Meg Merrilies' after Sir Walter Scott's fictional gypsy character in 'Guy Mannering' (written in 1815). Over time and in the absence of anything else, it has come to be regarded as the tartan for that family name. Miss McD says in her notes: 'The first mention I had of this tartan was in an advertisment by D MacDougall, Draper, 27 High Street, Inverness in 1831...Meg Merrilees and other winter shawls.' From Dalgety Archives. There appear to be many thriving Merrilees Family associations worldwide who wear the Merrilees tartan as woven by D.C. Dalgliesh of Selkirk. See also #6369 (original Scottish Tartans Authority reference) for a modern colour inversion to produce the dress tartan. - 1829 — Meg Merrilees, Old (1828) (tartans-authority, record)
An inversion of the Dress MacPherson (Stuart Davidson). Was being produced in 1829 as a fashion tartan named 'Meg Merrilies' after Sir Walter Scott's fictional gypsy character in 'Guy Mannering' (written in 1815).Over time and in the absence of anything else, it has come to be regarded as the tartan for that family name. Miss Margaret McDougal (Inverness Museum) says in her notes:"The first mention I had of this tartan was in an advertisment by D MacDougall, Draper, 27 High St., Inverness in 1831 . . . "Meg Merrilees and other winter shawls." From Dalgety Archives. There appear to be many thriving Merrilees Family associations worldwide who wear the Merrilees tartan as woven by D C Dalgliesh of Selkirk. See also #6369 for a modern colour inversion to produce the dress tartan. Wilson letters refer to new Meg Merrilees (AD 1828) and old Meg Merrilees (AD 1831). For the time being it's assumed that this is the 'old'.
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
- 1829 (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: 2938
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 1602
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 1602
Thread count
W/46 LB12 W12 R10 K70 R/20
One full sett is 274 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
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/w23lb6w6r5k35r10~x2/