Gordon of Esslemont Family 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 GGGGKBK.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 7 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=1064
Provenance
Earliest known date: c.1830 This sett is called 'Gordon of Esslemont' according to Captain Wolrige-Gordon of Esslemont in recent research. It was previously listed as 'Ancient Gordon' before the story of its origin came to light. Apparently the Duke of Gordon was offered tartans with one, two, and three stripes when he applied to Forsythe of Huntly to provide kilts for his troops. He chose the single stripe and called in the Heads of the families to choose from the others. Esslemont took the three stripe version.
3 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- c.1830 — Gordon of Esslemont Family Tartan (house-of-tartan, record)
- undated — Gordon of Esslemont (register-of-tartans, record)
This sett is called 'Gordon of Esslemont' according to Captain Wolrige-Gordon of Esslemont in recent research. It was previously listed as 'Ancient Gordon' before the story of its origin came to light. Apparently the Duke of Gordon was offered tartans with one, two, and three stripes when he applied to Forsythe of Huntly to provide kilts for his troops. He chose the single stripe and called in the Heads of the families to choose from the others. Esslemont took the three stripe version. This collection used to be in the Scottish Tartans Society archive, it has been returned to the Paton firm at Alloa. - undated — Gordon of Esslemont (weddslist, record)
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
- c.1830 (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
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 1464
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 1064
Thread count
Y/12 G6 Y6 G44 K46 DP46 K/8
One full sett is 316 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) |
| DP | #4B0B4F #4B0B4F | oklch(30.1% 0.125 325.4) |
| 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/s7/y6g3y3g22k23dp23k4~x2/