Talk:Tartan

"Highland regalia"

Resolved

 – To the extent any of this is on-topic, it is covered in the article's "Etiquette" section.

"Kilts have become normal wear for formal occasions, for example being hired for weddings in much the same way as top hat and tails are in England or tuxedos across the pond, and can be worn by anyone regardless of nationality or descent. " A recipe for fools. One could with equal truth say that any coat-of-arms can be selected and painted on the doors of one's SUV, "by anyone regardless of nationality or descent." In such circles, it is thought quite witty when someone refers to the North Atlantic as "the pond". --Wetman 19:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Now, coat-of-arms are "issued" by varrious authorities, usually governmental in nature, but also from some other "real" authorities, like varrious royal houses, and religious authorities. They can be obtained by those that are acceptable, in some conditions, like military officers and accidemic educated.

The "kilt" can be worn by anyone with scottish heritage (including by marrage), or from a location with a tartan (Canada and each province has a tartan that would be appropriate to wear). Many organizations also have a tartan (wearing that as well is acceptable). The point is to wear an appropriate tartan. Wearing the tartan is accepting the leadership of that "clan." A mute point today. There are many approriate tartans to wear. A person form Chile would wear the Cochrane tartan, to recognize the great contribution of the Admiral Cochrane to that country. Of course, if you have ever worn a kilt, the Government tartan is always appropriate. see link www.electricscotland.com/webclans/weartart.htm --User:Glenlarson

"A person from Chile would wear the Cochrane tartan, to recognize the great contribution of Admiral Cochrane to that country." Well, I live where Lorna Doone cookies are baked... But, which tartan would be appropriate if you were, say, from Vladivostok and stationed in Antarctica, one wonders... A "mute point" indeed! Similar fantasies encourage truly naive Americans to send away for "their" family crest-- say Smith-- and display it with pride to the gawping locals! The text remains in the article, what one calls "only a snare for geese."

—"I think we're all bozos on this bus." -Firesign Theater. --Wetman 01:47, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)--Wetman 01:47, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The original text was copied form the article titled kilt. Many may be upset at others wearing the kilt; however, Scottish culture has been spread around the world, including India and Pakistan, or any "British" Caribbean island, which have pipe bands. Few would think them of Scottish extraction, but they may be, and would have "right" to a kilt, regardless. They may even have a Scottish name!

One point of vies is but that, one. The talk page provides a forum for review, and yes many naive people do get "snared" ( see also Talk:Tartan). Don't know it is assumed I am a "Yank" but I do have more Scot blood than any other, all be it low land, but not the "name."

The reference for the assertion was provided. Do they live near?

Now white tie, was first what a Swed would wear to a wedding! --User:Glenlarson

Cornish and Welsh tartan kilts

Resolved

 – Covered in article now.

Just added a few brief words and links about the modern Cornish and Welsh Tartan Kilt phenomena. Bretagne 44 20:53, 1 March 2005 {UTC)

This isn't the Kilt article. We do now have mention of Cornish tartans, though not of Welsh ones, and might need to include the latter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:58, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

The article now covers these in the appropriate subsections of the "Tartans for specific purposes" section.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:06, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Tartan colours

Resolved

 – Covered in the colour section to the extent sources address this idea.

The colours used in a tartan's sett do have certain meanings, as does the amount of one colour in relation to other colours. I'm not very sure about many of them and would appreciate a list of the colours and the usual meaning, so as to be better able to read classic Clan settsn (and also weigh the claims made by the many "fictive" and fashion setts, chuckle chuckle... ;=} ).

I know there is one for landownership (brown or green?), one for coastal or Islay clans (blue, IIRC), yellow or gold--wealthy clan (e.g. Buchanan), black--clan with much ties to the clergy, there is one for livestock-wealth (was it green for the pasture or read for the meat?), military connections (red?)... What else are there, and could an authority on the topic pls. insert them in the Tartan article?

Thanks,

DJ Vollkasko
Temporary Newton Library
http://www.stillnewt.org/library
(User:212.149.48.43 11:08:03 8 February 2006)

The article now covers this, as entirely a modern thing. There is nothing like an established code of meanings for colours. Rather, the designer of the tartan asserts what inspiration they had for using particular colours, and this is best recorded at that tartans's individual entry in a tartan database. (Example: [1]).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:13, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

PS: I can't find any source anywhere for ideas like yellow meaning money, black meaning clergy, etc., etc. Modern tartans, however, frequently come with notes in the tartan databases like TartanRegister.gov.uk indicating why designers chose particular colours, but these are specific to a designer and are not a shared set of symbolic meanings. PS: The "16th century" section covers how red setts were more common in the eastern clans and green/blue ones in the west.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:58, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

The legend of colours conveying a heraldic-style differencing system is addressed at the "Colour, palettes, and meaning" section in a footnote. In lots and lots and lots of reading, I have yet to encounter any claims that brown/green stood for land ownership, gold/yellow for wealth, black for clergy, etc., so the article is not specifically addressing them (no sources). I think the "gold for wealth" is a distortion of the idea that some of the brighter colours were more costly (due to imported dyestuffs; it's part of why they tended to be used as thin over-checks, but I haven't found a really clear source on this yet I have now, and have cited it.). "Black for clergy" can probably be traced to one or another alleged clerical tartans made up in the Vestiarium Scoticum being black and white (Scarlett 1990 mentioned this in passing - correction: it was Logan; see below). But at this point it's basically original research on my part; I would need a source more directly spelling this out. (I would like to be able to dispel this "colours have specific meanings" legend, but I can't find a source that even mentions it yet, beyond the old Victorian belief that it was a heraldic differencing system.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:00, 13 June 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 04:57, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Some more on alleged clerical tartans: First , the church kept better records than anyone, so we would expect to find some evidence therein, but there is none. Rather the opposite: there are bans on the ministerial wearing of bright or "variant" coloured clothing, and the latter would surely include tartan. Not to mention tartan plaids themselves, by name, were banned several times by various church bodies. James Logan in the execrable The Scottish Gaël (1831), the first in a series of Victorian tartan books that veered between plagiarism and extreme imagination, listed a "Clergy" tartan in black, white, and grey, as if it were something of antiquity, but it is clearly based on an 1820+ fashion pattern by Wilsons of Bannockburn, which was named "Priest". Frank Adam in The Clans, Septs, and Regiments of the Scottish Highlands (1908, and another work that is basically crap, even in the later edition heavily revised by Thomas Innes of Learney) listed a blue, black, and white "clerical" tartan with a made-up Gaelic name, but it is also clearly a rip-off of the Wilson's "fancy" pattern. (Source: James D. Scarlett, Tartan: The Highland Textile, 1990, pp. 10–11.) I'm not sure "ecclesiastical tartans" are enough of a pervasive tartan legend to bother covering in the WP article, which is already quite long. If so, I guess it could be a footnote under "Tartans for specific purposes". Though I'm skeptical anyone reads the footnotes, and more of them should be converted into main-body text, after the article is split up.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:57, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Design principles

Resolved

 – Section on this now exists.

I'd love to see some info about tartan design principles, if any exist. If there is a registry, how similar is too similar? What motifs appear in related tartans? Are there tartans that combine motifs from two or more others? In other words, is there anything in tartanry that corresponds to the symbolic language of heraldry? —Tamfang 05:46, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

@Tamfang: I realize I'm answering you very late, but you might like to have a response anyway (and the questions are best answered, for the benefit of later readers, anyway). There is nothing like heraldry's set of rules and terminology when it comes to tartans. Design principles as a general matter might be something we could cover, if some sources could be found for it, but this is doubtful. "How similar is too similar" is going to be a matter of the inclusion criteria set by a particular database. The only one presently publicly running that I know of is the official Scottish Register of Tartans, and it offers some guidance here. I may work a reference to that into the our article (update: done). Tartans that combine design elements: surely; many tartans are loosely derived from other, pre-existing tartans (Black Watch in particular is "ancestral" to a large number of modern tartans). But I'm not sure that digging deep into that would be properly encyclopedic coverage of the general topic of tartan; more a matter for analysis and history of a particular tartan, e.g. at a specific clan's article in a tartan section. "What motifs appear in related tartans?" I don't really know what you mean by that. There isn't a catalogue of meanings assigned to things like thin black strips or wide bands of green.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:22, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

There mostly isn't a catalogue of meanings in heraldry either, but there is such a thing as allusion. —Tamfang (talk) 15:27, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

@Tamfang: Well, we don't seem to have any sources suggesting that elements in tartan design are understood allusions. Some modern tartans come with design notes in the databases (SRT, etc.) in which the designers share their inspirations, like what a particular colour choice meant to them, but it's not a "shared language" between designers. The colours section of the article already addresses this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:36, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

@Tamfang: Suprisingly, I was able, between a couple of major sources, to find enough design-principles material to create a short section on it, at Tartan#Styles and design principles. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:20, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! —Tamfang (talk) 23:20, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

@Tamfang: There's now an image gallery showing the different (surviving) styles, though the right-most needs to be replaced with a closeup (I have the thread count, and software to generate one, just have to get around to it).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:51, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

For the benefit of anyone coming along later: Design principles in general are now covered at the "Styles and design principles" section. The legend of heraldry-like colour motifs with meanings is covered in a footnote in the "Colour, palettes, and meaning" section (the separate legend of a "caste" system of colour is covered in a footnote under "16th century"). "How similar is too similar" is addressed in the "Registration" section. Various potentially confusing terms are covered in "Etymology and terminology" for the basics, and "Weaving construction" for the particulars.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:51, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Irish Clans

Resolved

 – The material in question is no longer in the article, other than brief mention of modern Irish district tartans and an Irish family tartan.

The line "The Irish people had clans too, except each clan mostly lived within its own community, also known as a county. So far, there are 32 counties in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland".

True there are 32 counties in the island of Ireland but they are not connected in any way to the Irish clans. The county system was imposed on Ireland by the English administration and based on the English county system, it's not native to Ireland in any way. It still exists of course and to the people that live in them there is firece loyalty, I live in County Louth.

Before the gradual conquest Ireland was made up of kingdoms e.g. Oriel, Meath, Connacht etc with an over-all High King.

EddieLu 16:14, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I had enough and since no one countered my notes above I removed the section on Irish Clans, as it was basically made up.

The concept of Irish Clans is a relatively recent one, and indeed the Irish Govt. has recently withdrawn the courtesy recognition it used to give to Chiefs of the Name following the McCarthy Mor fiasco.

As for Irish clan tartans again these are very recent and have no basis in tradition and are not connected to the history of tartan.

The only clan tartan recognised by the Chief Herald of Ireland is that of Clan Cian.

The county system in Ireland is a local government administrative one and not connected to the old Gaelic system. EddieLu 12:33, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

'Irish County' tartans are modern and tartan as we know it today in Ireland does not have a long history, the 1600s 'Ulster tartan' is probably from a Scots settler --80.177.198.45 (talk) 14:16, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

The article now covers all of this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:01, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Tartan vs. plaid

Resolved

 – The terms are now fully explained in the article; the Annunciation angel is also covered.

What's the difference? 71.234.109.192 (talk) 08:19, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Good question. I have noted a tendency to label old tartan "plaid" if it is found outside Scotland. see the Annunciation angel in "plaid" (painted 1333) at the Uffizi gallery Florence [Angel in "plaid" cloak]. If this picture was painted or located in Scotland, we would without hesitation refer to the cloak as tartan. Personally, being rather fond of the painting, I tend to refer to the angel as dressed in tartan. So what if it's in Italy, angels have wings. Czar Brodie (talk) 00:51, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Tartan is plaid, but not vice versa?

I just watched a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning (originally aired 11/25/2007; re-ran 9/7/2008) entitled "Going Mad Over Plaid". In the article, Doria De La Chapelle, co-author of a book "Tartan: Romancing the Plaid" by Jeffrey Banks, Doria De La Chapelle, and Rose Marie Bravo] states, "A tartan plaid, first of all, is Scottish, as opposed to American or English. It's Scottish." The article concluded "In other words: all tartan is plaid, but not all plaid is tartan." I was never aware of such a distinction. It further explained that a tartan pattern has to be made of "perfect squares", whereas a "plaid" can have "stripes".

I was looking forward to comments on the article till I noted that comments expire 72 hours after the article airs.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I someone could comment here on this rather strict definition of "tartan". Jbay54321 (talk) 14:40, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I just added a bit to the article about the term plaid. How i understand it, in Scotland plaid originally meant the garment known as the belted plaid worn before the modern kilt came into use. Because highland plaids, and later manufactured kilts, tended to be made up of tartan consisting of many colours, the terms plaid and tartan became confused and combined over the years, So before the confusion, plaid meant a type of garment/blanket, which could be made up of tartan; tartan was woven cloth on which patterns could be incorporated.

I just got Tartan: Romancing the Plaid out of the library, its one big beautiful book with gorgeous pics on every page :p.--Celtus (talk) 05:51, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

The article now explains this terminology adequately (without wallowing into opinions of individuals like De La Chapelle). However, we don't cover the Florentine angel in tartan cloak. I did find a working URL to get that image, but need to process it into Commons. It's on the to-do list.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:06, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

The painting is now covered in the article, but without an inlined image, as the design is too faint to be useful in the Tartan article, and I found a better medieval, non-Scottish tartan image.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:19, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Tartan etiquette

Resolved

 – The article has been restructured to put material in appropriate sections, including an "Etiquette" section.

This is part of the article, the last part of the 'clan tartans' section. I don't think it belongs there though. I wonder if the article could have a short 'tartan etiquette' section. That is what this paragraph appears to be. We would need some references though. What does anyone think?

Interestingly, a few tartans are now described as "general", i.e. acceptable for all to wear. The Black Watch tartan (see below) is the most well-known of these. Furthermore, the "Stewart Hunting Tartan" is also considered a general tartan by many; originally, as the name implies, a Stewart tartan, its use in several Highland regiments led to this broadening of its application. It remains, however, the most popular tartan in use by Stewart clan members. Finally, a few words should be said about the best known tartan of all: the famous Royal Stewart. Originally a variation on the Stewart of Galloway clan tartan, and as such a bona fide Stewart tartan, it was favoured by the Royal Family, wherefore many people consider it a Royal tartan. For this reason, it became a much sought-after tartan with the Highland regiments; and this, again, led to its present-day popularity, where it functions, for all practical purposes, as the Scottish Tartan, being used with everything from shortbread boxes to mugs and miniskirts. Queen Anne, foreseeing this development, remedied it once and for all by affirming that the British sovereign was to be considered clan chief of all Britons – English, Scots, Welsh and Irish – and that every (loyal) British subject therefore had the right to display her/his allegiance to the clan chief by wearing the clan tartan of the United Kingdom: the Royal Stewart.

--Celtus (talk) 05:05, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

The article's structure is better now, and there is an etiquette section. I cannot find any reliable (or even unreliable for that matter) sourcing for the Queen Anne claims. This sounds like yet another bit of misty legend.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:23, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Speaking of which, all this talk of "original" this and "originally" that is wrong. The royal Stewart pattern can only be dated to c. 1800, in records of Wilsons of Bannockburn. The idea that it's some pre-Jacobite "ancient" clan tartan is another bit of sourceless legendry.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:47, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Tartan vs plaid

Resolved

 – Both terms are now explained properly in the lead section, and the article is at the name that is not ambiguous, as it should be.

Why is this article not called Plaid? I can tell you that no one in North America says "tartan." Explain that in Scotland "a plaid is a tartan cloth slung over the shoulder or a blanket." But don't call the article "tartan" because of that. Macarion (talk) 01:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a North American encyclopedia - it's a global one, see WP:WORLDVIEW. As such any local dialect of English can be used, but there are fairly strict rules about what dialect to use when the subject has a particularly close association with a particular country - see WP:ENGVAR. In this case, the article obviously has a close association with Scotland and so its title and contents should be in British English (and arguably Scottish English, but that's another matter...). Hence it's called "tartan". However if you go to the Plaid article you will get a link here as one of the options. Usually it works the other way - us non-Americans have to put up with North American usage for all sorts of articles on Wikipedia, so it's only fair to have a bit of give and take. Le Deluge (talk) 22:55, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I totally agree with Deluge that since the tartan is culturally associated with Scotland, this article should use the word tartan and not plaid. As much as I find it shocking that my coworker here in California does not know what a tartan is, still, the world does not revolve around American English or Wikipedia articles purely written in American English. Another word for small is wee and you can say grand for good. This is an opinion of someone who lived both in Scotland and U.S.A. ICE77 (talk) 07:40, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Not to mention the fact that the idea that Americans don't know what tartan means and don't use it is just wrong anyway. It tends to be used more for named (clan, family, district, organizational, etc.) setts, with generic "fashion" setts begin called plaid. Virtually no one in the US would speak of a "plaid kilt", even if they're also likely to use "plaid shirt" rather than "tartan shirt", but they know what you mean if you say "tartan shirt". The previous attempt to rename this page failed for good reasons.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:14, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Diaspora

Resolved

 – Diaspora is covered. Portgual stuff added to to-do list in newer section.

The traditional dress of inhabitants of Nazare (Nazareth) in Portugal is a southern European interpretation of Tartan/Plaid. Legend has it this was from when the Scots landed there to help the Spanish and Portuguese defeat Napolean's army. The locals were so happy to see them or so taken with their garments that they fashioned lighter, more colorful versions. The Scots have been stationed so far and wide that this can't be the only instance of locals adopting Tartan as their own. —Preceding unsigned comment added by N.anderthal (talk • contribs) 22:29, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

@N.anderthal: Sorry no one has replied to you until now. We would need reliable sources for something like this. However, the article probably does need a section on use of tartan outside Scotland and the Scottish diaspora in US/CA/AU.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:05, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I've worked diaspora material into the 20th century section. Added the Portugal stuff to a list of non-Scottish material to cover, below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:20, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Comments

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 – All 7 line-items accounted for.

Being a fan of Scotland and tartans, I read this article with much interest. I learned several things but I think the article can be improved and expanded. I made several improvements, primarily to the layout and the structure. I have a few comments.

1. The introduction briefly mentioned two of the most famous tartans, then it mentioned them again later. I consolidated the information in a single place and created a section for two of the most popular tartans. I also added two images.

2. The article is not clear about dress and hunting tartans. It provides an explanation for the dress tartan but it doesn't really say anything about the hunting tartan (explaining them as a "Victorian conception" is insufficient). My understanding is that hunting tartans are for the outdoors and that there is no correlation to hunting.

3. This article should have a dedicated section that lists adjectives that describe tartans such as ancient, muted, modern, dress, hunting, mourning and universal.

4. The tartan with the caption ""Ye principal clovris of ye clanne Stewart" which appeared in the Sobieski Stuarts's forgery Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842" should be properly labeled a "Clan Stewart/Stuart tartan" instead (possibly with the additional label of "dress" since the typical red of the standard "Clan Stewart/Stuart tartan" is replaced by white).

5. I believe the sentence "Both organisations are registered Scottish charities and record new tartans (free in the case of STS and for a fee in the case of STWR) on request." should really say STA rather than STS. It seems logical to me.

6. It would be nice to load an image of the Falkirk tartan in the origins section and an image of the Balmoral tartan in the etiquette section.

7. I am not completely sure whether the Black Watch is truly also called also Universal or that specific tartan happens to be a universal tartan. The big or small u make a difference in this context.

ICE77 (talk) 08:33, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

@ICE77: Taking these points in order:

1. Good!
2. "Hunting" tartans are now addressed adequately.
3. "Ancient", "muted" and "modern" are now covered in the colour section; "dress", "hunting" and "mourning" (plus "dance") are covered in the section on tartans by purpose. "Universal" isn't really a thing (it's a marketing term used to try to sell more tartan). We do mention it, though, under "Etiquette".
4. The image in question is no longer in the article.
5. The "STS" typo has been fixed.
6. There's no free image to use of the Falkirk tartan. The Balmoral is included, though in the "Family" section where it is first mentioned.
7. "Universal" has been removed from that sentence; you're right that it has been called "a universal tartan" but not "the Universal tartan".

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:51, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: Actually Black Watch was named "Universal" at one point, and the article now covers this. It was a term that the War Office applied, when they had a Childers Reforms plan to impose the same tartan on all the Scottish regiments, a plan they abandoned. It was not a name in regular use, but a few post-1881 writers did mention it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:44, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Proposed new section on government tartans

Resolved

 – We have the subject well-covered now both at this article, as to history, and at List of tartans, as to illustrating the ones still in use.

Various of the Wikipedia articles on Scottish Regiments (e.g. the article on the current Royal Regiment of Scotland) refer to Black Watch tartan, or to Government no 1, or to Government no 1A, but they are sometimes ambiguous as to whether they really mean 1 or 1A or what the difference is. I think it would help to explain this in one place, which the various articles on individual regiments could refer to. I propose adding a subsection under "Other Tartans" on this pages called "Government Tartans" and listing there either just 1 and 1A, explaining the origins and difference, or possibly listing all the other Government Tartans that are included in what I believe is the official specification, UK/SC/6335. Any better suggestions or objections?Johnstoo (talk) 16:22, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I decided that the best place for this list was in the "List of tartans" page so have added a starter version there.Johnstoo (talk) 12:17, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@Johnstoo: That was a good call (and I edited the List of tartans section that's above your government section to no longer be partially redundant with it). However, as I've suggested in a thread below, the Tartan article really does need to better cover the overall history of regimental tartans (without trying to be a list of them all, or getting into WP:MILHIST levels of military-unit detail mongering). Something I plan to get to eventually (I have the sources for it).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:56, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm now done with this; see Tartan#Regimental tartans.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:35, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 8 July 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. There is clear consensus that the article should not be moved to the proposed title, nor is there consensus regarding any of the other titles which were proposed. (closed by non-admin page mover) Jack Frost (talk) 05:57, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

---

Tartan → Scottish and Irish tartan – Please place your rationale for the proposed move here. HLHJ (talk) 03:04, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Either we need to rename this article to something culture-specific like "Scottish and Irish tartan", or we need to include all the other cultures that use tartan/plaid/patterns made by varying the colour of both warp and weft. There's traditional plaid/tartan cloth in Japan, in India, in various parts of Africa, etc.. I'd suggest a rename. This article deals primarily with Scotland (and a bit of Ireland); the short description even ignores Ireland. The weaving technique is hardly restricted to these places. We need an article somewhere on these woven patterns generally; this article does not represent a worldwide view of the subject, which is fine but it should be named accordingly. Suggestions for other names for a general article are welcome.

• 
  Folk dancers in Aizawl, Mizoram
• 
  Sari
• 
  Voting queue in dun tartan (hard to see some of the patterns in small size).
• 
  Tartan shirts lungis, saris, etc.. Commons:Category:Voting lines in India contains photos most of which seem to show some tartan cloth.
• 
  Children in Ghana race against the wind
• 
  Mexico
• 
  Japanese print, c. 1780-1790

I could go on. See Wiktionary:格子 for Japanese and Chinese terms for plaid. HLHJ (talk) 03:04, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

No. "Tartan" is culture-specific, not a term for checked cloth patterns in general. Mutt Lunker (talk) 09:53, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

No, for the same reason as above. Tartan is specific to a culture; Scottish heritage is also celebrated outside Scotland in Tartan Day, and followers of the Scotland national sports team are known as the Tartan Army. Gabriella MNT (talk) 11:39, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay, so what do we call cloth non-Scottish-tradition cloth patterned by varying the colour of both warp and weft? I don't care what we call these articles, and I'm fine with having an article on Scottish tartan, I just also want a place to put information of such woven patterns in general, in all cultures. Sure, Scottish-tradition tartans are used outside Scotland. It seems inappropriate to shove information about kimono patterns into this article, though, or even gingham plaid. There is an article called Plaid (pattern), but it redirects here.

On English usage, "checked cloth" to me means cloth printed like a checkerboard, which is not the same as a woven pattern (Check (pattern) agrees with me on this, but also has information on Scottish tartan and keffiyeh). My OED gives both the Scotland-specific and general cloth-pattern definitions for each of "tartan" and "plaid", distinguishing them only by saying that plaid is twill-woven (I think American usage is just "plaid", regardless or whether tabby weave or twill). The link plaid is a disambig including things not necessarily Scottish, like plaid shirts.

Mutt Lunker, Gabriella MNT, do you have suggestions for where information on non-Scottish-tradition cloth patterned by varying the colour of both warp and weft should go, and what the article it goes in should be named? I want somewhere to put information on the weaving technique and how it's used around the world. HLHJ (talk) 13:32, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't. That it is hard to define the remit of your subject possibly indicates it isn't particularly a thing.

In Scotland, a plaid is specifically the item of clothing, which is usually but is not always tartan (e.g. can be Hodden grey, per this example), so mentioning "plaid" in your article would be an unnecessarily ambiguous choice and best avoided. Mutt Lunker (talk) 14:04, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. "Tartan" is not a synonym for "any plaid clothing". I'm not even sure if the topic nominator seems to want to exist at "base" Tartan is really a thing - List of clothing with plaid patterns perhaps? That might stray into breaking list guidelines of picking a random thing to list by, but I'd recommend making that article first, and then if-and-only-if usage can be found that some reliable source uses "Tartan" to refer to plaid saris or the like, that a hatnote be added to the current "Tartan" article. SnowFire (talk) 14:18, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. If this article is too Scottish/Irish focused then a new subsection could be added/the lead rewritten slightly to allow for tartan in other cultures to be added. It needs expansion and a rewrite perhaps, but not a new article/name. LordHarris (talk) 16:09, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. "Tartan" is specifically a Scottish/Irish cultural thing, not a generic term for striped or plaid clothing. JIP | Talk 16:11, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Etymological detail: Originally, "plaid" was a word borrowed from the Gaelic, and referred to a type of blanket or garment (of any colour or pattern), and "tartan" was an English word (borrowed from the French) for tartan-pattern cloth. If you are making cloth by hand, striped and tartan patterns are a way to decorate cloth with little extra labour, so peasants around the world wore it, and rich people tended to shun it (see, for instance, Madras (cloth)). In the late 1600s and 1700s, England broke out of the Malthusian trap; from living on subsistence farming, it transitioned to an industrialized economy, with unprecedented wealth per capita.[2] This was largely driven by the automation of spinning and weaving, making England able to produce cloth very cheaply, and export it for great profit. So English people were on average richer and could also buy cloth much more cheaply.

Scotland, not so much. Scotland was still poor. English visitors at the time noted that people still spun by hand, wove with hand looms, and ground their grain with hand querns. They also wore cheap wool twill plaids, in striped and tartan patterns; the poorer people owned only a long shirt and a plaid, which served as a garment by day and a blanket at night. There were changeable regional fashions in patterns. The English did use striped and tartan cloth, but nowhere near as much, and often for things like mattress covers, where no-one would notice if it looked cheap. Tartan-pattern cloth became associated with Scots in both England and Scotland.

Then in the mid-1700s came the Highland Clearances, among other things. Scots were upset. There was political unrest and Jacobitism, which became associated with Scottish dress. In the Dress Act 1746, clothes that were considered typically Scottish were banned, including multicoloured plaids (the garments) and tartan-pattern cloth in most contexts. If you go to the article and read the text of the ban, you'll see that "plaid" is used for the garment, and "tartan" for a pattern. It was repealed in 1782, and in Victorian times tartans were systematized, given heraldic significance (largely by a couple of Jacobite pretenders) and became all the rage, especially after being adopted by the royal family. If I were making this up I'd make it more plausible.

Later, Americans came to use "plaid" as a synonym of "tartan", using both words to refer to both the pattern type and the Scots garments (this pattern-describing usage of "plaid" existed by the late 1930s [3]). Some Brits now do the same.

So it isn't hard to define the subject; the English vocabulary is just a bit awkwardly ambiguous (we have lots of articles on subjects with ambiguous English names). If I were describing, for instance, the mask-adjusting picture above, I'd say the child is wearing a tartan shirt and shorts (if speaking to a Brit), or a plaid shirt and shorts (if speaking to an American). I'd think it would be obvious from the context which sense of "tartan" or "plaid" I was using. If "List of clothing with plaid patterns" is a reasonable category, and we could call the garment in the image above a "plaid sari", than "plaid patterns" must be a thing that exists. I tend to agree with Mutt Lunker that "tartan patterns" would be less ambiguous, but obviously SnowFire would disagree. I suspect this is a transatlantic dialect disagreement. That's why I want input.

If this article is too Scottish/Irish focused then a new subsection could be added/the lead rewritten slightly to allow for tartan in other cultures to be added.
— LordHarris

The tartan article, which is already quite long, is almost entirely about Scotland, as the short description says. I think a rescope would make more sense.

"Tartan" is specifically a Scottish/Irish cultural thing, not a generic term for striped or plaid clothing.
— User:JIP

Unfortunately, it is both, as is "plaid". This can be independently verified with an etymological dictionary (including Wiktionary: Wiktionary:plaid#Noun, Wiktionary:tartan#Noun). HLHJ (talk) 18:32, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I've only skimmed through the above as the greater part seems to have little pertinence to the subject of cloth patterns and much is factually inaccurate. I'd like to note that the attribution to me of the advocacy of the term "tartan patterns" for such an article, or that it is less ambiguous, is without basis. I'm not sure you should be stating SnowFire's view for them either. Mutt Lunker (talk) 19:00, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm sorry to have misrepresented you, Mutt Lunker. Since you said:

In Scotland, a plaid is specifically the item of clothing, which is usually but is not always tartan (e.g. can be Hodden grey, per this example), so mentioning "plaid" in your article would be an unnecessarily ambiguous choice and best avoided.

I thought you were saying that "tartan" was less ambiguous than "plaid" for the cloth pattern, which I thought would logically imply that "tartan patterns" would be less ambiguous than "plaid patterns". As I think you said, patterns in plaids (garments) include but are not restricted to tartan. Clarification welcome. A quarter of an hour before your post, Snowfire did not object to my characterization of Snowfire's views (below), so at least I did a bit better there.

I'd appreciate knowing what portions of what I wrote are factually inaccurate. HLHJ (talk) 01:17, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Just confirming that I'm an American as far as usages here. I think this proposal might be a case of cart-before-the-horse. If you think you can write a good article or list on plaid patterns / tartan patterns / "usage of striped patterns in clothing in general" from a global perspective, go for it (in Draft or User space if need be)! It very well might be worth a mention on Tartan (disambiguation) and in this article if created. But even if that article is created, I'd still be skeptical about moving this article - as the 1986 reference in the lede notes, "The words tartan and plaid have come to be used synonymously, particularly in North America. This usage is incorrect when referring to Scottish tartan." In other words, "tartan" has priority when referring to Scottish & Gaelic tartans and the culture associated with them. But we definitely shouldn't even consider moving it until the "pattern in general" article is created, else it be (discouraged) preemptive disambiguation. SnowFire (talk) 18:45, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, SnowFire. I'd be happy to make such an article. I do think that "tartan" is better for referring to the Scottish-tradition heraldic patterns. Obviously the preferred word used to describe, say, Madras (cloth) varies geographically. Maybe I should call it "double stripe", like "double ikat", just to sidestep the whole tomahto/tomayto (there's plahd/played for "plaid", too; I think "played" is the pronunciation more common in Scotland). And insert an etymology section. But I think I should probably let this discussion end first. HLHJ (talk) 01:17, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

• oppose as has been stated by other editors 'tartan' isn't a generic term for checked cloth it is specifically a cultural thing. This is backed up by the wiktionary links nom posted btw—blindlynx (talk) 14:33, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
  • I do think those Wiktionary links (Wiktionary:plaid#Noun, Wiktionary:tartan#Noun) have both senses. See sense 2 of tartan, sense 3 of plaid, and the adjective senses of both, which would apply to "tartan kimono". But it seems a number of editors use "checked" or "checkered" in a sense different from me calling this a chequered kimono. Could any future responses please go beyond disagreeing with my usage and discuss what terms they would use for different types of cloth pattern? How would you describe the garments in the images? HLHJ (talk) 03:30, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

This discussion is about the issue you raised, the requested move. Don't complain if people come here to address the matter you raised. Your proposal having been roundly rejected, if you want people to engage in a discussion about something else, start a new discussion. As your new issue is more general and not about tartan specifically, this may not be the place discuss it; perhaps Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Textile Arts? Mutt Lunker (talk) 09:24, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

This isn't a discussion of those cloths—it's a discussion of tartans—why are you asking us to go off topic?—blindlynx (talk) 13:37, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Please, if you think I'm wrong, say why, or I'm unlikely to learn better

I don't think I've made myself clear. When I said "different types of cloth pattern", I meant tartan patterns, and possibly checkered patterns if someone feels they are not the same. I should have been less ambiguous. This is a discussion of the title of the article called "Tartan"; discussing the meanings of the word "tartan", one of which, I contend, is a pattern of cloth, seems relevant. If "tartan" does not mean this pattern of cloth, asking what term does describe the cloth seems reasonable, especially when there are dialect differences here, which i think is why we are arguing. I know you have both said that "tartan" is not a term used for cloth with warp and weft stripes, but you haven't said why (or why you think I'm factually incorrect). Blindlynx said that their opinion was supported by Wiktionary, and I've explained why this does not seem to me to be the case. I'll now additionally cite Webster, since he's out of copyright and American:

Checker Check"er (?), v.t. [imp. & p.p. Checkered (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Checkering.] [From OF. eschequier a chessboard, F. \'82chiquier. See Check, n., and cf. 3d Checker.]

1. To mark with small squares like a checkerboard, as by crossing stripes of different colors.

2. To variegate or diversify with different qualities, color, scenes, or events; esp., to subject to frequent alternations of prosterity and adversity.

Our minds are, as it were, checkered with truth and falsehood. Addison.

...

Tartan (?), n. [F. tiretane, linsey-woolsey, akin to Sp. tiritaña, a sort of thin silk; cf. Sp. tiritar, to shiver or shake with cold.]

Woolen cloth, checkered or crossbarred with narrow bands of various colors, much worn in the Highlands of Scotland; hence, any pattern of tartan; also, other material of a similar pattern.

...

Plaid (?), n. [Gael. plaide a blanket or plaid, contr. fr. peallaid a sheepskin, fr. peall a skin or hide. CF. Pillion.]

1. A rectangular garment or piece of cloth, usually made of the checkered material called tartan, but sometimes of plain gray, or gray with black stripes. It is worn by both sexes in Scotland.

2. Goods of any quality or material of the pattern of a plaid or tartan; a checkered cloth or pattern.

Plaid, a. Having a pattern or colors which resemble a Scotch plaid; checkered or marked with bars or stripes at right angles to one another; as, "plaid muslin".

Plaided, Plaid"ed, a.

1. Of the material of which plaids are made; tartan.

"In plaided vest." Wordsworth.

2. Wearing a plaid.

Campbell.

Plaiding Plaid"ing (?), n. Plaid cloth.
— [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/673/pg673.txt

This seems to me to give three American names for the crossed-stripe woven patterns I am describing. All these names have additional meanings, none of them are unambiguous (with the possible exception of plaiding, which would probably not be accepted in British English). Can we agree that the words "tartan", "plaid", and "checkered" can (among other uses) reasonably be used in English to describe crossed-stripe cloth outside of the Scottish and Irish cultural traditions (e.g. "a tartan kimono")? Or can we agree on any other term?

Wikipedia has Tartan patterns and Plaid (pattern) redirecting here; would anyone object if I wrote, or at least drafted, a global, non-culture-specific article to be the target of these links, as SnowFire suggested? HLHJ (talk) 00:30, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Every definition of 'tartan' you have provided and what most editors here are arguing is that 'tartan' is specifically a pattern related to Scottish culture, therefor this page should not be moved. Whether this is an appropriate redirect for those pages is a different discussion. Maybe Check_(pattern) would be better?—blindlynx (talk) 03:41, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

I am not arguing that tartan is not a pattern related to Scottish culture, merely that that is not the word's only meaning. Webster's "other material of a similar pattern" seems to me to unambiguously be a definition that allows referring to that kimono as tartan. Check (pattern) might work for US usage, which does not distinguish between the pattern found on a checkerboard, with squares of two different colours alternating orthogonally, and the pattern found on gingham, with three different colours of squares. But in British usage, and in many other languages, the two are distinguished, and indeed the conceptual distinction is pretty clear. If there are two concepts, there should be two articles (I recently split an article that covered an HVAC system and a Quranic reference to a spring in heaven in a single article; imagine the categorization...). The British OED (which I have not quoted due to copyright) says "tartan" is a woolen cloth with this pattern, "especially" as worn in the Scottish highlands, or other cloth with the same pattern (they silk and velvet [!] as examples), or a Scottish plaid with a clan's heraldic pattern. The OED's definition of "chequer" does not admit the three-colour-square version, let alone a pattern with narrow rectangles. I'm not sure what Indian English uses. Ideally, we want a term which:

• clearly distinguishes the crossed-stripe pattern from the checkerboard checker (eliminates "checkered", since Americans use it for both)
• will not be seen as catachresic by readers from outside the United States (eliminates "checkered" and "plaid", since Brits use these words for other meanings)
• will not be seen as catachresic by readers from inside the United States (eliminates "tartan" since Americans think this is Scotland-specific[4][5])

Etymologically, we could go with the oldest term. Or we could go with a descriptive term. So... woven cross-stripe? Double stripe, by parallel with double ikat? If no-one cares, then sure, this discussion is over, but I'm happy to hear to other views. HLHJ (talk) 23:58, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

• 
  Checkerboard. Two colours.
• 
  Gingham with squares in three colours.
• 
  Gingham with squares in four colours.
• 
  Three colours of squares, obviously not a possible plain-woven pattern.
• 
  A heraldic tartan, woven in 2/2 wool twill. Threads of four colours are interwoven to make rectangles of eight colours. Most of the rectangles aren't square.

• Oppose. Utterly overwhelmingly, English-language sources use the word to refer to what is described in this article. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:57, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

I think we've established that there's opposition to the proposed move, there is opposition to discussing alternate terms here, and the discussion has apparently gotten TL;DR. HLHJ (talk) 23:58, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Follow-up (on internationalising)

(Aside from confusion of Scottish and Irish) one of the big flaws in the proposal above and of much of the reasoning througout the discussion is that the fact of modern-day worldwide use of tartan/plaid (terms which are now entirely adequately explained in the lead), and a bunch of photographic evidence of tartan and more often simple chequer-board pattern from around the world, tells nothing encyclopedic and historic. Of course tartan is all over the world, just as T-shirts and jeans are; modern manufacturers have a global market. This doesn't indicate that we need to devote space to presentation of information about Western informal dress in every society, nor do we need to do something like that for use of tartan everywhere.

What would be of encyclopedic relevance would be evidence of use of tartan-style patterns outside Northwestern Europe in the pre-modern era. Of all the evidence presented above, the only thing useful is the 1780s Japanese woodcut. This inspired me to do some digging and we now have an "In other cultures" section with a "Japanese kōshi" subsection. It's a start, and we will probably need some additional subsections on use of similar cloth in other parts of the world without any clear connection to Scottish tartan. This requires source research, and a bunch of whining that the article is "too Scottish" isn't helpful. Our article is heavy on Scotland-related details because all the reliable source material is.

So, what historical but non-Scottish tartan/plaid use is our article missing?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:12, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

One gap I can identify: coverage of Maasai shúkà (we have a little on it at Maasai people#Clothing). It is frequently in tartan patterns, almost emblematically so. The Maasai and the British were 19th-century allies for a time in various of the colonial-period wars. [6]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:45, 17 May 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 07:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I've added a subsection, Tartan#Maasai shúkà that covers this, but it's actually got more detail and sourcing than the corresponding Maasai people#Clothing, so at Talk:Maasai people I've suggested some merging or even a separate Shúkà article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:23, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Also, as noted in an earlier thread, there's a tartan tradition in Nazaré, Portugal. Need to find some sources on this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:32, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Image to use for this later: File:Museu dos Texteis - MUTEX 22.jpg – antique loom, with tartan cloth, in Museu dos Têxteis (Museum of Textiles) in Castelo Branco, Portugal.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:45, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Commons appears to have zero images of the clothing style. From what I gather here, it's a style called escocês ('Scottish'), and was formerly commonly worn, along with a long sock-like cap ending in a tassel[7][8], by fishermen. What I can tell from other materials[9][10][11][12][13] is that it's a now-old folk costume (obsolescent after maybe the 1950s), and is not the common wear of the people today, but just put on (perhaps for the benefit of tourists) during a few saints day festivals and a carnival period starting in early January. A recent photo of fishermen in the area at work doesn't show them wearing tartan stuff[14]. I can't find any source to corrorborate the story posted above in another thread: "Legend has it this was from when the Scots landed there to help the Spanish and Portuguese defeat Napolean's army. The locals were so happy to see them or so taken with their garments that they fashioned lighter, more colorful versions." However, there appears to be a book that would be a good source, if it can be found and someone fluent in Portuguese can read it: de Mattos e Silva, Abilio Leal (1970). O Trajo da Nazaré. Lisbon: Editorial Astória. In the interim, I cannot find any usable colour images, and only a tiny handful of black and white ones (a couple of Edwardian-era postcards) that could be poached for Commons. Beyond that, I don't have anything further to report on Nazaré tartan. There's just not yet enough material to work with.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:48, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Also, our lead image at Tatars shows 1870 Tatars of Kazan wearing tartan-patterened clothing, so we need to cover their use of this kind of cloth. Haven't found much; one blog showed examples and also said they're similar to patterns used by Finnic peoples.[15] The angel in Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus, with a tartan cloak, is generally held to be wearing "Tatar" cloth, but that meant Mongol cloth.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:27, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Okay, I got those integrated into the article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:28, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

J. F. Campbell (1862), p. 366, wrote of tartan (and other) patterns being common in the South Sea Islands (though that's a vague term, and could refer to peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia, or Micronesia).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:34, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Still haven't found anything usable on this sub-subject.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Scarlett (2008) also observed tartan patterns in Bhutan. Newsome has an article on it here[16] and there may be enough material for a little subsection on it. There's some more on it here [17], but not a reliable source. Bhutanese weaving is often far more complex than tartan, but does include tartan patterns.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:24, 11 June 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 20:45, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Found some Bhutan pics on Commons, so will add some to gallery. Google Scholar has papers that might go into it [18]; I have not trawled through them yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:32, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Some of the terminology is mathra, pangtsi, bura, and kira, though I'm not sure yet which are terms for particular garments, for types of cloth, or for patterns. Found an entire book, substantial portions of which are online: Altmann, Karin (2015). Fabric of Life: Textile Arts in Bhutan – Culture, Tradition and Transformation. De Gruyter. ISBN 9783110428612 – via Google Books.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:41, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

From that book, I'm gathering that the generic term is bumthang, with various specific varieties having their own names (mathra, adha[ng] mathra, sethra, burai mathra, pangtsi; non-tartan linear stripes, like seersucker cloth, is called adha mathra). I can't really tell more, because the full relevant pages are not available from the GBooks preview.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:09, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

There was enough material accessible online from that book (by browsing its full-accessible pages and by searching snippet-view in it) to write up a short subsection on mathra (the actual general term) tartans in Bhutan, so I did, with some Commons pics.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:43, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

South American tartans/plaids have been mentioned in a source or two. I went through both Weaving identities: Construction of dress and self in a highland Guatemala town by C. E. Hendrickson (1995), and Costume and identity in highland Ecuador by A. P. Rowe & L. Meisch (1998), and while I saw a few pictures that had a tartan-ish appearance, some were not true tartan but the product of supplementary weaving (colours crossing each other without blending), regular linear-striped cloth was more prevalent, and even more represented were complex abstract and figural patterns. Neither book addressed tartan/plaid patterns as a particular style in Guatemala or Ecuador at all, so it seems we have to look elsewhere in South America for an encyclopedically noteworthy tradition of weaving this kind of cloth.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:02, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Clan tartans

Resolved

 – Error corrected, and "Clan tartans" section written.

User:2601:8C3:857D:5DD0:B592:73F3:E6AD:726D improperly added these comments (in bold) into the main article instead of the talk page:

The Dress Act of 1746 attempted to bring the warrior clans under government control by banning the tartan (tartan was not banned in the dress act - see the actual text) and other aspects of Gaelic culture. When the law was repealed in 1782, it was no longer ordinary Highland dress, but was adopted instead as the symbolic national dress of Scotland, a status that was widely popularised after King George IV wore a tartan kilt in his 1822 visit to Scotland. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the highland tartans were only associated with either regions or districts, rather than any specific Scottish clan. (no, clan tartans began to be identified as such from the end of the 18th century by the Highland Society of London and more widely Wilson's of Bannockburn)

I'll revert the edit but I think it's worth looking into by someone more knowledgeable. The Scotsman says that tartan cloth itself wasn't necessarily banned and The House of Tartan gives a late 18th century date for clan-specific tartans, not a 19th century one. Again, someone who is better versed in Scottish history and has the time might know better and how to track down more appropriate sources. TangoFett (talk) 23:07, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

The Dress Act (AKA Disclothing Act) claim does need closer examination. It was an act against Highland dress in general, but it might not have used the word tartan[e] specifically. "The end of the 18th century" is not correct. The Highland Society solicited "true clan tartans" from chiefs in 1815 (early 19th century) but many could not comply since there was mostly no such thing yet, while others newly adopted clan tartans. Some clans waited until later in the 19th century, especially after the mid-19th century (specifically 1842) publication of the Vestiarium Scoticum forgery, or even the early 20th in a few cases, to adopt a clan tartan. As for Wilson's, they and Lt.-Gen. Sir William Cockburn sent agents to collect "perfectly genuine patterns" from the Highlands from 1810 up to 1822 (again, early 19th century). These setts were numbered, given fanciful names, or named after prominent individuals, and not associated with any particular clans. (Those that are today used as clan tartans generally have completely different names, sometimes more than one, in the Cockburn Collection.) A source we can use is here. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:42, 8 May 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 22:49, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

This National Geographic article says that tartan per se was not banned by the Dress Act, but that the banning of kilts, Highland great coats, and trews (the garments typically made of tartan) reduced the Scots to wearing more mainstream European dress, and effectively the "everyday link to tartan was irrevocably severed". The article is quoting Peter MacDonald here, in a source we can also use (it analyses the Act of Proscription and its Dress Act in some detail).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:14, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I've addressed the error complaint this opened with (about tartan itself allegedly being banned), using some of the sources I mentioned. Also improved the chronological flow of material in that section. Updated: Also fixed the "tartan ban" error in the lead section, last night.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:44, 13 May 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 00:51, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Some additional points, and this all really needs to be worked up into a coherent, chronological "Clan tartans" first subsection under "Modern use" (though the "Modern use" header itself, bifurcating the "History" section, should probably go):

• 1831: James Logan published The Scottish Gael, a romanticized work that inspired some commercial weavers to invent a number of "clan tartans". This was after "the King's Jaunt" in 1822 but before Vestiarium Scoticum (1842).
• 1844: Publication of another dubious work, The Costume of the Clans, which purported to reveal a number of "clan tartans" without any evidence behind it. Some of the proposed tartans were nevertheless adopted.
• 1880: Clans Originaux was published in Paris by J. Claude Fres. & Cie. Several more purported clan tartans were adopted from this work.
• Early 20th century (during the latter Gaelic Revival and Scottish Renaissance): By this era, virtually all Scottish clans (armigerous and otherwise) had adopted at least one clan tartan. Perhaps the latest holdout was Baird, to 1950. Update: Whatever source I got that from is wrong or at least disputed, since another puts the date of the Baird tartan to 1906 (though with a later slight colour shift) [19].
• I have in old notes from the 1990s that one (single) clan tartan is purported to date to 1618, but I didn't note which one it was or what source said that (and I think it probably really meant that one of the modern, official clan tartans was adopted from a portrait dating to that era, not that a clan in 1618 declared they had an official clan tartan). It'll have to be looked up again. After downsizing my library from a backbreaking 5,000+ volumes to about 100, I no longer have a bunch of tartan books, but am re-acquiring some of them, so we'll see what they say, if no one else with access to a bunch of such books beats me to it.
• Official clan tartans (additional "side" tartans like hunting, dress, or dance) continue to be created into the 21st century. I ran into such a case late last year, though I didn't record which clan it was establishing a new tartan (it was a dance one as I recall, though). I would have found this while looking at clan association websites, so that would be how to find it again (and probably other instances like it). Update: Found it; it's the red version of MacGregor dance. The dance tartan is discussed here [20] and found in three colour palettes here. Two date to 1975, but one to 2005.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:14, 12 May 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 00:49, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: I have overhauled the article to have a coherent "Clan tartans" section, with a bunch of new info and sources, and with relevant pre-existing material massaged into it. I wrote it to be capable of splitting off into a side article fairly easily, if we thought that was warranted. Redirects like Clan tartan, Clan tartans, Scottish clan tartans, Highland clan tartan, etc., go to this section. I think this overhaul will much better serve our readers than making them wade through the entire long article to tease out tiny bits of clan-tartan-related detailia.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:06, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

A BBC documentary, Spinning a Yarn: The Dubious History of Scottish Tartan (which gets some minor things wrong but mostly agrees with the book sources I have) suggests, without any details or indication where they got this from, that "some MacDonalds", Clan Gregor, and the Gordons may have had early informal clan tartans. Not a great source, but it bears looking into in better sources.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:23, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

The 1618 clan tartan claim

Resolved

 – The claim has been accounted for in detail.

The claim I mentioned above, I've narrowed it down a little.

'The first documented effort to enforce a uniformity of tartan worn throughout an entire clan was in 1618, when Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun wrote to Murry of Pulrossie requesting that he bring the plaids worn by his men into “harmony with that of his other septs”. It was a Red Gordon!'[21]

As I said above, I had encountered this claim before. It's hard to know what to make of it without looking into a lot of old books; I'll add it to my to-do list. What I see in Googling around for this, is that "House of Gordon USA" says this, and dozens of other websites have copy-pasted it verbatim, with no one ever citing a period source. And the claim is vague; it could be referring to the size of the plaid (the plaid is a garment, not a pattern; in that era it would almost certainly have been referring specifically to the great kilt) or some other aspect than the tartan. Bears further research. If it does turn out to be early evidence of what amounts to a clan tartan that would be fascinating. But it also would not change the fact that almost all of them were adopted from 1815 onward.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:08, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

I tracked it down to Innes of Learney, and integrated the material. It required moderating this article's long-standing implication that zero clan tartans pre-dated the late 18th century, though various claims like that the tartan in question is a known particular Gordon tartan are not sustainable. The sources actually conflict sharply on their ideas about what it was. I've documented this in a footnote.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:02, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Alleged 1793 commissioning of regimental and clan/sept tartans

Resolved

 – Dispelled in the article now.

In addition to the above, the House of Gordon USA clan association website claims:

'In 1793, Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon commissioned three patterns based on the Government tartan (Black Watch) from William Forsythe of Huntly. He chose the version with the single yellow over check for himself and his new regiment, and subsequently offered the double and triple tram line versions to the two main Cadet Branches of the Family.'[22]

This would also be interesting if it could be substantiated by a source independent of the subject (especially given that this particular clan-society website has already proven unreliable on something).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:25, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

In Dunbar (1979) is the original 1793 material on which this embellished claim is based, and it says nothing of the sort. Forsyth (not Forsythe) made three variants of a regimental tartans, and the duke chose one. Nothing about clan tartans or cadet branches. I've covered this in the "Lack of further evidence of early adoption" section  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:20, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

D. W. Stewart and Thomas Innes of Learney

Resolved

 – Opinionated material from these authors has been balanced by cites to other researchers.

I've pored over the historical (and theoretical) material in these works – D. W. Stewart's from 1893, and Innes of Learney's from 1939. It's been quite a slog. Due to their propensity for quoting older material at great length, the books have been useful for a number of details throughout the article. As to their "clan tartans are ancient" theorizing, I have tried to give them a fair shake, a WP:DUE one, in light of modern tartan scholarship generally rejecting this viewpoint. (In short, I'm taking the WP:FRINGE approach that the popular but discredited viewpoint needs to be explained and dismissed with better evidence, not just swept under the rug.) This seemed best summarized as a subsection on the nature of the debate itself (which plenty of our readers would have no idea of before arriving here). That subsection still needs some work, relying more on modern books and their own summaries of the debate and where it has presently ended up; but it's a start.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:36, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I've balanced out the material from them by material from later, more research-than-advocacy-minded writers and the evidence they provide.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:36, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Morier's painting

Resolved

 – Kept the relevant point, removed the material that's misleading.

In the section on lack of evidence for early adoption, we have (with a source):

David Morier's well-known mid-18th-century painting of the Highland charge at the 1745 Battle of Culloden (right) shows the clansmen wearing various tartans, despite men charging in kindred groups. The setts painted differ from one another and very few of those painted resemble today's clan tartans.

Scobie (2012) claims that the painter relied on captured Highlanders as models, wearing whatever tartan they were told to put on. Scobie's article is irrational garbage, but if he's actually right about this particular claim, then the material quoted above (I think ultimately from J. Telfer Dunbar) is not actually a valid example of counter-evidence against the "ancient clan tartans" legend, and should be removed as misleading (though the accompanying illustration might be useable in the "17th–18th centuries" section). Our article at An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745 neither confirms nor denies Scobie's claim, so further source investigation is needed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:47, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I found another source for the prisoners claim, so I have modified the passage to read: David Morier's well-known mid-18th-century painting of the Highland charge at the 1745 Battle of Culloden shows the clansmen wearing various tartans; very few of the setts painted resemble today's clan tartans. That point is actually still relevant, and not misleading.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:34, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Actually, Scarlett (1990, p. 23) says this is yet another legend. The original claim, from Archibald Campbell (1899) was: "The Highland soldiers must have been painted from prisoners, as it is impossible than an English solider, sitting as a model, could have put on the Highland dress so well." Baldfaced opinion with no basis, which later writers turned into certain fact. Regardless, the short version in the article now is better, because the depicted Highlanders not having matching plaids could have multiple explanations, like them all being paid models who brought their own outfits, or having been provided outfits from some random stockpile of tartan material that Morier had, or the artist just making up patterns that suited his fancy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:40, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Dunbar (1979, p. 73) actually agrees with the prisoners story, and says it was accepted by the Jacobite Relics and Rare Scottish Antiquities Exhibition in Edinburgh in 1946.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:31, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Gauls

Resolved

 – Found enough sourcing to add some stuff to article

I've read repeatedly (in sources I no longer own; this was back in the 1980s and 1990s) that according to Roman writers of late antiquity, the Gauls commonly wore "striped or chequered" cloth, Latin lacking separate words for the two concepts. I think it might have even been in Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico (58–49 BC), but I'm not sure; perhaps something from the early ADs. At any rate, it seems worth including under "Pre-medieval origins" if the details can be dug up somewhere.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:57, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Also: ca. 100 BC [more likely 60–30 BC, time period of the writing of his Bibliotheca Historia], Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described continental Celts as wearing clothing "brightly coloured and embroidered ... chequered in design, with separate cheques close together and in various colours", and seems to be describing tartan or something similar to it. I remember encountering this before in proper sources, though in this case I found it on a random website by Googling around. So a proper source will be needed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:16, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

D. W. Stewart in Old & Rare Scottish Tartans (1893) [23] has on p. 8 a quote of some side commentary on this, from the editor (E. G. Cody) of volume 1 the 1885 Scottish Text Society edition of John Lesley's The Historie of Scotland:

The Latin braccæ [what the Romans called Gaulish trews] is generally understood to be equivalent to our breeks. There are, however, traces of the Latin word being used in a wider sense to mean a loose flowing garment. ... We find braccæ described as pictæ and virgatæ, coloured and striped. Perhaps the original braccæ, which so took the attention of the Romans when they met the Gauls, were striped and party-coloured, and so gave rise to the name. In Irish, breacan still means a plaid. It would seem, then, that the Latin word is borrowed from Celtic.

This is interesting (iffy), but fails to cite the original Roman sources, so I'm still left looking for what those are.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:26, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I've found some more material, including a Virgil quote, and some info that Cody's etymology was bogus. Worked this into the pre-medieval section.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:12, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Other sections that need some work

Resolved

 – All of these sections are well-developed now.

The "Colour: shades and meaning" section is missing "weathered", though it is mentioned later in our article. I have a source for this and for generally improving that section when I get around to it. (J. Charles Thompson's So You're Going to Wear the Kilt covers all these terms in considerable detail.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:20, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: "Weathered" turns out to be just another name for "ancient". Anyway, I have overhauled this section, too, with addl. source.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:45, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Or not. Sources actually did not entirely agree with each other. I've produced the best synthesis of them I can muster.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:25, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

The "Dress, hunting, and mourning" section on tartans-by-purpose is missing Highland dance tartans, a whole category. The material is confusing dress and dance tartans, which are distinct categories.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:38, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: I have fixed this problem, with several additional sources.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:43, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Also, the widely separated "History of registration" and "Registration" sections are redundant and need to merge (some of the material in the former needs to merge into the planned section on clan tartans, though; see thread further above).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:38, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: This has been resolved in my recent overhaul.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:07, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

The "Modern use" section should not stop dead at Queen Victoria, but continue to the present. Much of the material in the "Tartans for specific purposes" subsections "Corporate and commercial" and "Fashion" really belongs in the "Modern use" history section, with those two other sections being rewritten to discuss tartans that are for commercial and fashion purposes, not the general history of tartan in the abstract being used in modern commerce and fashion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:43, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: I've done all this now, with addition of some new material, though the "20th century to present" section needs more, probably from Tartan: Romancing the Plaid.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:37, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Done. I've used all sorts of sources to round out this section on modern tartan.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:48, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Regimental tartans

Resolved

 – Section now exists, and the source conflict mentioned below has been dealt with.

We also need more coverage of the history of regimental and other military use. A good source for this will probably be The Uniforms & History of the Scottish Regiments, which I have obtained but not waded into yet. I also just re-obtained History of Highland Dress.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:38, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I have about half of this new section drafted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:20, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Now about 4/5. It's been almost painful work, as The Uniforms & History of the Scottish Regiments in particular is very obtusely written. We also have an apparent source conflict, which I've spelled out here at a regiment article's talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:41, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: The Tartan#Regimental tartans section now exists, and is comprehensive as I can make it with my available sources (and without bogging the reader down in regiment-naming and -merger trivia). I've tried to focus on tartan and tartans, not on units and their leaders.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:33, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

The source conflict mentioned above has not been resolved yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:48, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Seems to be dealt with now. Two known sources versus an unknown conflicting one, so we're going with the two known ones.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:17, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Fencible regiments

Covering their tartans may be difficult, as sourcing is thin. One bit to use later: "The origins of the MacDonald (Clan Donald) tartan are equally vague [with that of Cameron of Erracht] but the similarity between the two, and also the MacDonell of Glengarry, suggests that the latter two were also military, probably Fencible, tartans, a theory supported by MacDonell of Glengarry in a letter in which he refers to the tartan being worn by his regiment." This is from (already cited elsewhere in the regimental section): Eslea MacDonald, Peter (January 2012). "The Original Cameron of Erracht Cloth?" (PDF). ScottishTartans.co.uk. Retrieved 24 June 2023.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:27, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Twill construction

Resolved

 – The "Weaving construction" section has been completely redone with reliable, clear sources.

The "Construction" section begins with "Each thread in the warp crosses each thread in the weft at right angles."

However, I think this is wrong, and it should read something like Traditional tartan cloth is a 2/2 twill. Each pair of threads in the warp crosses a pair of threads in the weft at right angles. This produces a characteristic diagonal pattern when the material is examined closely. Then add a close-up illustration.

I am not a weaver, though, and am not certain this is the very best wording to express what tartan "is" from a construction standpoint.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:55, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Update: I've used wording like the above, and will later take and upload a close-up photo, since I can't find one on Commons that is clearly tartan and not some other form of twill.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:47, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Further update: I merged more detailed wording out of the lead and into this section. I think it is okay, but someone more experienced with textile terminology should look it over. I've asked for some review at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Textile Arts.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:50, 15 May 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 11:07, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Meeting with dead silence, I have ordered a book on tartan weaving. [sigh]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:35, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

The pairs thing above was wrong. Each single weft thread goes over two then under two though the warp; it staggers by one thread on each pass, which has the effect of making also each warp thread cross two weft threads. Between three or four sources we have this covered now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:50, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Unless I'm missing something, the sentence that bothered you is trivially true of anything made on a loom, regardless of pairing. —Tamfang (talk) 01:29, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Good point. I'm still working that material over with additional sources.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:36, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Unsourced quotations

Resolved

 – All three are now accounted for.

There are three unsourced quotations in the article. They are precise and in pre-modern English, so I don't think they are bogus, but we need sources for them. My searches so far have just been turning up other websites parroting Wikipedia. These likely all came from the same book, but I don't know which one it is (and it doesn't seem to be any of the ones I have). The quotations are all important material, too, so are not just something to delete.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:45, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

I've replaced one of these with a sourced equivalent (though a not-quite-identical translation) from Grameid. The other two, pertaining to the Highland Society of London's 1815 letter and response to it, are from Blair Urquhart's rather obscure book Identifying Tartans (1994).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:05, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Eventual splitting of article

I think the clan and regimental tartans sections are long and developed enough to consider splitting out into side articles. The whole article is still shorter than plenty of other articles (e.g. on countries, on major politicians and other public figures, etc.) – it's not even in the top 500 largest WP articles – but it is getting pretty long. Leaving behind a WP:SUMMARY-style précis of each will take a fair amount of careful editing, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:06, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

The whole set of history sections might actually be splittable as History of tartan, much as Silk is now split off to History of silk and a lot of additional side articles. For now, I prefer to work on sourcing as much material as possible. I'm basically taking a working vacation and doing source-research on tartan full time until I run out of steam. We can re-arrange it later.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:10, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Separate articles that I think can be spun off, so far:

• Tartan weaving and design, from the "Weaving construction", "Styles and design principles", and "Colour, palettes, and meaning" sections
• History of tartan, from the "Pre-medieval origins", "Medieval", "16th century", "17th and 18th centuries", "Late Georgian", "Victorian", and "20th century to present" sections, with compressed summaries also of "Regimental tartans" and "Clan tartans".
• Regimental tartan, from the "Regimental tartans" section
• Clan tartan, from the "Clan tartans" section

I think also some stubs can be created:

• Shúkà, from the "Maasai shúkà" subsection
• Kōshi (textile), from the "Japanese kōshi" subsection
• Mathra (textile), from the "Bhutanese mathra" subsection
• Can probably also do one for Suurrätt, by translating the Estonian article [24].

That said, I – being the only one doing any of this work at all – do not want to do this splitting any time soon, as I'm still sourcing the material on a daily basis, and doing so would become vastly more difficult if the work were spread across half a dozen or more separate articles; often a single source page provides material relevant to three or more sections of the WP article. (Given that I just ordered 10+ more source books, this is going to take a while.) Just the splitting itself is going to be a tremendous job, because all the source citations will have to be repaired on a page-by-page basis, and then the material has to be summarized (sometimes multiple times, e.g. clan and regimental tartans have to be differently summarized for the main article and for the history article, with differing levels of detail and a different focus/intent). Per WP:HASTE (and WP:IAR for that matter), there is no hurry, and this article is still smaller than a bunch of others across many topics, like List of Glagolitic manuscripts, ‎List of Statutory Rules and Orders of Northern Ireland, Tawag ng Tanghalan (season 6), ‎List of Hindi songs recorded by Asha Bhosle, ‎Municipal history of Quebec, 1922 regnal list of Ethiopia, List of battles by geographic location, List of Gunsmoke (TV series) episodes, ‎List of common misconceptions, ‎Opinion polling for the 2023 Spanish general election, ‎List of 2021–22 NBA season transactions, ‎2022 in science (many of them rote lists that are barely encyclopedic). If they aren't breaking anything, then neither is Tartan.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:32, 9 July 2023 (UTC); updated 01:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Legal protection

Resolved

 – This section seems to be in good shape.

The "Registration" and "Etiquette" sections contained a kind of random commingling of legal (intellectual property) information in them, and I found good sourcing for more such information, so I merged that all into a "Legal protection" section, and put all three as subsections under a "Regulation" heading.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:23, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

"Jacobite" tartan

Resolved

 – Article covers it now.

I've run across several claims that 1707-onward Jacobites wore one or more specific tartans, that are identified. But so far I can't find proof of this.

In M. B. Paterson (2001), p. 172, footnote 38, is this claim: "the Jacobite sett has been known from 1712 'and is claimed to have been popular in 1707 when Lowlanders wore it as a protest against the Union of the Parliaments.' This is sourced to Margaret MacDougall's 1974 revision of Robert Bain's Clans and Tartans of Scotland.

However, in the SRT, here's what I find:

• Jacobite, Old [25] - "Several 19th century hard tartan specimens of this pattern are known from museum collections. Nothing is known of its origins. Given an 1850 date for archiving."
• Jacobite No. 2 [26] - "This sett appears in a collection made by the weaving firm Patons of Tillicoultry. The samples are undated but the collection is known to have been put together between c.1880-1950. The Jacobite sample is thought to date to the 1930's."
• Jacobite - 1850 [27] - "Details from W and A Smith's 'Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland', pub. 1850. The authors state that this pattern was taken from a silk scarf or plaid manufactured in 1712 but for which they offer no evidence beyond the family tradition of the unnamed lady said to have owned it when they were writing in 1850. Apparently based on the Smiths' claim, W & AK Johnston state (1896), again without any evidence, that this tartan was adopted by the Jacobites prior to the '15."

So, the third of these seems to be the source of the claim, but SRT considers it unreliable, and for good reason. I'm not really sure what to report in our own article. It needs (badly) to serve the purpose of refuting oft-repeated legends about "old" tartans, so we should probably cover this one way or another.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:05, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I managed to work it in.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:26, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Sources to get access to

Found these, but only the abstracts are available for free:

• Norman, A. V. B. (1999). "The Uniform of the 8th (or Rothesay & Caithness) Fencible Regiment". Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research. 77: 172–180. At JSTOR, paywalled.
• Nicholson, Robin (November 2005). "From Ramsay's Flora MacDonald to Raeburn's MacNab: The Use of Tartan as a Symbol of Identity". Textile History. 36 (2): 146–167. doi:10.1179/004049605x61546. Also available at ResearchGate [28] and ScienceGate [29] but paywalled there, too.
• Coltman, Viccy (2010). "Party-coloured Plaid? Portraits of Eighteenth-century Scots in Tartan". Textile History. 41 (2): 182–216. doi:10.1179/174329510X12798919710635. Also available at ResearchGate [30] but paywalled there, too.
• Dziennik, Matthew P. (2012). "Whig Tartan: Material Culture and Its Use in the Scottish Highlands, 1746–1815". Past & Present. 217 (1): 117–147. doi:10.1093/pastj/gts025. Also available at JSTOR [31] but paywalled there, too. Hinderks (2014) says: "As late as 1794, it was documented that only military regiments had fixed tartans.", and cites Dziennik (2012) for this, but it's too vague a claim to use in our own article; need to see what Dziennik actually wrote and on what basis.
• Thorburn, W. A. (1976). "Military Origins of Scottish National Dress". Costume. 10 (1): 29–40.
• Tuckett, Sally J. S. (2009). "National Dress, Gender and Scotland: 1745–1822". Textile History. 40 (2: Researching the Garment Industry): 140–151. doi:10.1179/004049609x12504376351308. Also available at U. Glasgow [32] and ResearchGate [33] but paywalled there, too.
• Quye, A.; Cheape, Hugh; Burnett, J.; Ferreira, E.; Hulme, A.; McNab, H. (2003). "An historical and analytical study of red, pink, green and yellow colours in quality 18th and early 19th century Scottish tartans". Dyes in History & Archaeology. 19: 1–12.
• Quye, A. (1991). "Dye analysis undertaken in the NMS between October 1989 and September 1990". Dyes in History & Archaeology. 9: 27–31. – said to be directly related to tartan
• Wilson, M. L. (1987). "The Wilsons of Bannockburn". The Scottish Genealogist. 34 (2): 315–320.
• An old primary source: Ranking, B. Mongomerie (January 1884). "The Tartan Plaid". Time. Vol. 10, no. 58. London. pp. 50–55.
• The Proceedings of the Scottish Tartans Society, journal, 1980s-1990s – will be nearly impossible to find, probably, except in Scottish libraries.

Papers available in full-text:

• Greenwood, Karina (6 April 2018). The Tartan Ladies: A Comparative Analysis of Tartan and Gender Through Queen Victoria and the Scottish Suffragettes (PDF). Undergraduate Journal of Art History and Visual Culture 14th Annual Art History Undergraduate Symposium. University of British Columbia.
• Wehbé, Seta K. (2006). La Mode à l’Écossaise: Textile of Diplomacy. Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. Textile Society of America / University of Nebraska – Lincoln. 299.
• Grierson, Su (1984). "Vegetable Dyes of Scotland". Journal of the Society of Dyers & Colourists. 100: 209–211.
• Grierson, Su; Duff, David; Sinclair, Roy S. (1985). "The Colour and Fastness of Natural Dyes of the Scottish Highlands". Journal of the Society of Dyers & Colourists. 101: 220–228.
• Tuckett, Sally J. S. (2010). Weaving the Nation: Scottish Clothing and Textile Cultures in the Long Eighteenth Century (PDF) (PhD). University of Edinburgh.
• Hann, Michael; Wang, Chaoran (2016). "Symmetry, ratio and proportion in Scottish clan tartans". The Research Journal of the Costume Culture. 24 (6): 873–885. doi:10.7741/rjcc.2016.24.6.873.
• Pinkerton, William (1858). "The Highland Kilt and the Old Irish Dress". Ulster Journal of Archaeology. 6: 316–327. – This is an old primary source, but might contain something usable.

Books to check out:

• Brown, Ian, ed. (2012) [2010]. From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0748664641. – "This critical re-evaluation of tartan in Scottish culture draws together contributions from leading researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, resulting in a highly authoritative volume." I have this on hand and it is what I'm currently going through for the WP article, as of 2023-07-05. This is going to be a lot of slow work, as it is dense, academic material.
• Telfer Dunbar, John (1979) [1962]. History of Highland Dress. Oliver & Boyd. ISBN 978-0713418941. – I have used this source (all of it) already, as of 2023-07-05.
• Scarlett, James D. (1990). Tartan: The Highland Textile. London: Shepheard-Walwyn. pp. 36–37. ISBN 978-0856831201. – I have plundered most of this for material already. I did not go over the tartan-by-tartan "The Setts of the Tartans" chapter that makes up the bulk of the book (and there are surely a few gems hidden in there), because there are much bigger source fish to fry.
• Telfer Dunbar, John (1990) [1981]. The Costume of Scotland. B. T. Batsford. ISBN 978-0713425352. – the two printings have the same number of pages so are probably equivalent. The ISBN here is for the 1990 printing, but the URL goes to the 1981 version.
• Telfer Dunbar, John (1977). Highland Costume. William Blackwood & Sons. – Skip this one; it's just a 62-page booklet.
• McClintock, H. F. (1950) [1943]. Old Irish and Highland Dress (2nd enlarged ed.). Dundalk: W. Tempest / Dundalgan Press. 2 vols. – I've bit the bullet and ordered this, trans-Atlantic (because the US sellers wanted even more than the British ones with shipping).
• Sutton, Ann; Carr, Richard (1984). Tartans: Their Art and History. New York: Arco. ISBN 9780668061896 – via Internet Archive. – This sounds worth getting, but it's available free online, so yay.
• Zaczek, Iain; Phillips, Charles (2013) [2004]. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Tartan. Wigston, Leicestershire: Anness Publishing. ISBN 9781780192758. – This appears to just be a newered edition, under a new title, of the work below. I have this one on-hand.
• Zaczek, Iain; Phillips, Charles (2006) [2004]. The Complete Book of Tartan. Edinburgh: Lomond Books. ISBN 9781842040874. – There's a newer 2013 printing/edition from another publisher (see above), but unknown if it materially differs. We cite it once, so see if the page number cited for the paper one above still works for this online version (if so, swap out a citation to this one, since it's online-verifiable).
• Zaczek, Iain (2005). The History of Tartan. Wigston, Leicestershire: Anness Publishing. ISBN 9781844762095. – The one is different from the above two. I have a copy on order.
• Zaczek, Iain (2001). World Tartans. Barnes & Noble. ISBN 9780760725894. – This one is just another tartan flip-book of clan and district tartans, that also includles US, Canadian, Australian, etc. entries. I don't think it goes into historical use of tartan-style cloth in world cultures, so it is unlikely to be of use for this article.
• Scarlett, James D. (2003). The Origins and Development of Military Tartans: A Re-appraisal. Partizan Press. ISBN 1858185009. – This is only a 48-page booklet, and with shipping costs it will be about $30, but I ordered it anyway, because it may have info on some of the more obscure regiments. A detailed review here indicates that most of the material in it that we would use already appears in compressed form in Tartan: The Highland Textile, and our article already contains those relevant facts. So, this may not have been a good purchase.
• Scarlett, James D. (1972). Tartans of Scotland. Lutterworth Press. ISBN 978-0718819309. – This appears to be another flip-book of clan tartan images, like Bain's guide; probably of no use for this article.
• Scarlett, James D. (1973). The Tartan Spotter's Guide. Shepheard-Walwyn. ISBN 978-0856830037. – Only 84 pages, but a reviewer says "explains a lot in a very concise and easily understood manner. It is a great tool and resource in a small package." Might be useful for terminology citations, etc. I ordered a copy, since I found it cheap.
• Scarlett, James D. (1985). The Tartan Weaver's Guide. London: Shepheard-Walwyn. ISBN 9780856830785. – Might have useful info in it, but has become a pricey collectors' item.
• McOwan, Rennie; Urquhart, Blair; Urquart, Libby (2001) [1996]. Tartans: The Facts & Myths – An illustrated historical guide (2nd ed.). Stroud: History Press / Jarrold. ISBN 9780711716698. – Sounds worth a look, so I ordered it.
• Cheape, Hugh (2006) [1991]. Tartan: The Highland Habit (3rd ed.). Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland. ISBN 978-1905267026. The old 1991 edition is available online [34]. I have the 3rd ed. on hand now.
• Grange, Richard M. D. (1966). A Short History of the Scottish Dress. London: Burke's Peerage. – Surprisingly makes a case for Lowland origin of tartan and its spread to the Highlands; this is too bold a claim to even mention in the WP article without reading it in detail and giving it a serious WP:DUEWEIGHT analysis.
• Pastoureau, Michel (2003) [1991]. The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes. Translated by Gladding, Jody. Washington Square Press. ISBN 978-0743453264. – I think this covers some tartan-style cloth in South America and elsewhere. Old edition is available online[35].
• Faiers, Jonathan (2021) [2008]. Welters, Linda (ed.). Tartan. "Textiles That Changed the World" series (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Visual Arts. ISBN 978-1350193772. – The old 2008 edition is available online [36]. I have the current edition on order.
• Adam, Frank; Innes of Learney, Thomas, Sir (1970) [1908]. The Clans, Septs, and Regiments of the Scottish Highlands (revised ed.). Edinburgh: Johnston & Bacon.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) – There's very little of use in this; it reads like it was written in 1808 not 1908. Whatever revision Learney did, it is invisible. May look at its tartan section one more time, but I think anything usable from it has already been used.
• Urquhart, Blair, ed. (1998). Tartans: The New Compact Study Guide and Identifier. London: Apple Books. ISBN 9781850764991. – This might be the newest edition of Urquhart; I'll have to check. This [37] seem to be the hardback edition from the same year, presumably with the same text. As a "flip book" of clans and tartans, I don't see much use for it at this article, though.
• Sutton, Ann; Carr, Richard; Cripps, David (1984). Tartans: Their Art and History. New York: Arco. ISBN 978-0668061896.
• Phillips, Charles (2005). Tartan: An Illustrated Directory. London: Southwater. ISBN 9781844761555.
• Fulton, Alexander (1999). Clans and Families of Scotland: The History of the Scottish Tartan. Edison, New Jersey: Chartwell.
• Kinloch Anderson, Deirdre (2013). A Scottish Tradition: Tailors and Kiltmakers, Tartan and Highland Dress Since 1868. Castle Douglas: Kinloch Anderson Ltd / Neil Wilson Publishing.
• Franklyn, Mary Eliza (1979). The Wearing of the Tartan. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Petheric Press. ISBN 9780919380301.
• MacKinnon, Charles Roy (1992) [1984]. The Scottish Highlanders: A Personal View. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 9780880299503. – Has a chapter on the Highland regiments that might be of use.
• Mackay, J. G.; Macleod, Norman. The Romantic Story of the Highland Garb and the Tartan. Stirling: E. Mackay. – This is old enough it should be treated as a primary source. Update: I have plundered this already for everything usable in it for this article.
• Keltie, John Scott, Sir; Maclauchlan, Thomas; Browne, James (1875). A History of the Scottish Highlands, Highland Clans and Highland Regiments. Edinburgh/London: Fullarton.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Vol. 1[38], Vol. 2[39], Vol. 3[40], Vol. 4[41], Vol. 5[42], Vol. 6[43], Vol. 7[44], Vol. 8[45] – Old, so treat as primary source.
• Zaczek, Iain (2000) [1998]. Clans & Tartans of Scotland. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 9780760720745.
• Zaczek, Iain; Mair, Jacqui (2001). The Book of Scottish Clans. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 9780760725900.
• Munro, R. W. (1977). Highland Clans and Tartans. London: Octopus Books. ISBN 9781850520771.
• Costantino, Maria (2010) [2003]. Handbook of Clans & Tartans of Scotland. Bideford, Devon: Kerswell Farm. ISBN 9781906239565.
• Scottish Tartans Authority (2017) [2014]. Clans and Tartans: Traditional Scottish Tartans. Glasgow: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780008251093.
• McNab, Christopher; Scottish Tartans World Register (2010). Clans & Tartans of Scotland & Ireland. Lomond Books. ISBN 9781842042496.
• Pickels, Dwayne E. (1997). Scottish Clans and Tartans. Chelsea House.
• Grant, James; Thompson, J. Charles (1992). Scottish Tartans in Full Color. New York: Dover. ISBN 9780486270463.
• Grant, Neil (1998). Clans and Tartans of Scotland. Hertfordshire: Regency House. ISBN 9781853614651. – flip-book of clan tartans, probably not of use for this article; there's a 2000 edition, ISNB 9781585740949, but I dobut it's different (probably just hardcover vs. softcover).
• Grant, Neil (2000). Scottish Clans & Tartans. London: Hamlyn. ISBN 9780600597766. – Ditto.
• MacLean, Charles (1998) [1995]. The Lomond Pocket Book of Clans and Tartans. Lomond Books. ISBN 9780947782559. – Ditto.
• MacLean, Charles (1990). The Clan Almanac: A Complete Guide to Scottish Family Names. Moffat: Lochar. ISBN 9780948403392. – Ditto.
• Scottish Clans & Tartans: History of Each Clan and Full List of Septs. New York: Dorset. 1991. ISBN 9780880297240. – Ditto.
• Martine, Roderick; Pottinger, Don (1992). Scottish Clan and Family Names: Their Arms, Origins, and Tartans (New ed.). Edinburgh: Mainstream. – Ditto.
• Way of Plean, George; Squire, Romily (1994). Scottish Clan & Family Encyclopedia. Glasgow: HarperCollins / Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs. ISBN 9780760711200 – via Internet Archive. – This one may actually have some historical information about tartan in it. However, there's a newer edition than this, 1998, ISBN 978-0760711200. The article already has one citation to the 1994 version. I've ordered the 1998 version, since I found it for a pittance.
• Way of Plean, George; Squire, Romilly (2000) [1995]. Clans & Tartans. Collins Pocket Reference. Glasgow: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-472501-8 – via Internet Archive. – This is mostly a pocket flip-book of clan tartans, but did have some usable info in it; it's cited at least once in the article. If the same info can be found in their other book above, might be better to just cite the one.
• The Scottish Clans and Their Tartans, with Notes. Edinburgh/London: W. & A. K. Johnston. c. 1900. – Yet another clan-tartans book. And Old enough it has to be treated as a primary source.
• Hesketh, Christian (1972). Tartans. London/New York: Octopus. ISBN 9780706400335.
• Ralph Lewis, Brenda (2004). Tartans. Edison, New Jersey: Chartwell.
• Davis, Jenni; Bold, Alan. Scottish Clans & Tartans: The Pitkin Guide. Norwich: Jarrold Pub. ISBN 9781841650517.
• Grimble, Ian (2013). Scottish Clans & Tartans. Broxburn: Lomond Books. ISBN 9781842043417.
• Innes of Learney, Thomas, Sir (1983). The Scottish Tartans: Histories of the Clans, Chiefs' Arms, and Clansmen's Badges. Stirling: Johnson & Bacon.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Browne, James (1838). A History of the Highlands and of the Highland Clans. Glasgow: A. Fullarton & Co. – Old; treat as primary source.
• Bolton, Andrew (2003). Bravehearts: Men in Skirts. Victoria & Albert Museum. ISBN 978-0810965584. – Despite the vague topical scope, apparently has a significant amount of kilt & tartan stuff in it.
• Harvie, Christopher (2004) [1977]. Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present (4th ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415327251. – Very broad topic, but does address tartan as a nationalism symbol. Hinderks (2014) cited an old edition of this.
• Mackay, J. G. (1924). The Romantic Story of the Highland Garb and Tartan. Stirling: Eneas Mackay. – very partial text is available online here[46]
• Campbell, Archibald (1899). Highland Dress, Arms and Ornament. Westminster: Constable & Co. – via Internet Archive. – Old enough it has to be treated as primary; most of what it says of relevance has been reused by later writers, but it may have something on regimental tartans or whatever that could be used.
• Miller, Haswell (1956). Common Errors in Scottish History. Historical Association. – Has good material in it, quoted by a blogger here[47]. I'll use that intermediary source in the interim, as the original book is very elusive.
• Pace, Paul L. (2017–2019). Kilts & Courage: The Story of the 42nd or Royal Highland Regiment in the American War for Independence, 1776–1783. Devonshire Books. In 3 vols. Newest research, so won't be found on Google Books or anything. Will have to buy it outright or get it through inter-library loan if possible. Associated website: [48].
• Clyde, Robert (1995). From Rebel to Hero: The Changing Image of the Highlander, 1745–1830. Tuckwell Press. ISBN 978-1862320277. – I've ordered a copy of this.
• Prebble, John (2000) [1988]. The King's Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, 1822. London: Birlinn. ISBN 9781841580685. – I've ordered a copy of this.
• Martine, Roddy (2004) [1987]. Scottish Clans and Famliy Names: Their Arms, Origins and Tartans (New ed.). Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 9781840189841. – Another clan tartans flip-book; can't see any use for that at this article.
• Martine, Roddy (2022). Clans and Tartans of Scotland. Birlinn. ISBN 9781780277745. – Ditto.
• Smitherman, P. H. (1963). Uniforms of the Scottish regiments. London: H. Evelyn – via Internet Archive.
• Wilkinson-Latham, Robert (1975). Scottish Military Uniforms. Newton Abbot / New York: David and Charles / Hippocrene Books – via Internet Archive.
• Thorburn, W. A. (1979). Regiments of the Scottish Division: Histories, Tartans and Music. Macmillan Press. – I have this.
• Henderson, Thomas; Adjutants to the Assistant Regimental Secretary (2006–2009). The Royal Regiments of Scotland (Scots): Dress Regulations. Edinburgh: Graphics Office, Regimental Headquarters (2nd Division), Royal Regiment of Scotland – via Internet Archive. – Undated and surely outdated; it definitely pre-dates 2010 (library accession in 2009), but post-dates 2005 (Royal Regt. of Scotland dates to 2006).
• Henderson, Diana M. (1997) [1996]. The Scottish Regiments (2nd ed.). HarperCollins. ISBN 9780004710259 – via Internet Archive. – Potentially of use for the regimental tartans section. Available online, so not ordering it. There are lots of other books like this available through Internet Archive [49][50][51][52][53]; search for "Scottish Regiment" and "Highland Regiment".
• Mileham, Patrick J. R. (1996). The Scottish Regiments, 1633-1996. Kent: Spellmount – via Internet Archive.
• Murray, Archibald K. (1862). History of the Scottish Regiments in the British Army. Glasgow: Thomas Murray & Son – via Internet Archive.
• Grimble, Ian (2002) [1977]. Scottish Clans & Tartans: 150 tartans illustrated in full colour. Book Sales Inc. ISBN 9780785815082. – Yet another clan tartans flip-book. Don't need this for this article.
• Phillips, Charles (2005). Tartan: An Illustrated Directory. Wigston, Leicestershire: Anness Publishing. ISBN 9781844761555. – Sounds like another flip-book of clan tartans.
• Wilton, Brian (2007). Tartans. Quarto Publishing/Aurum Press/National Trust for Scotland. ISBN 9781845130985. – Seems to be a combination of an overview book like Banks & de La Chapell's Tartan: Romancing the Plaid and a clan-tartans identifier book. I ordered it anyway just in case because I found it for very cheap.
• Ralph-Lewis, Brenda (2023). Tartans: From Scottish Clans to Canadian Provinces. Amber Books. ISBN 9781838863227. – Sounds like a "coffee table book", and seems (from its blurb) to devote a lot of material to US and Canadian designs; I'm skipping this one.
• Ralph-Lewis, Brenda (2004). Tartans: Over 300 historic and modern tartans from around the world. Chartwell. ISBN 9780785818793. – Yet another tartan flip-book.
• Mackay, James (2008). Clans & Tartans of Scotland & Ireland. Barnes & Noble. ISBN 9781435109148. – Ditto. And just the fact that it takes "Irish tartans" seriously, despite them being wholly a product of the industry for marketing to Irish-Americans, with no connection to actual Irish tradition, makes it a suspect source.
• Smith, Philip D., Jr. (2019) [1986]. Tartan For Me! Suggested Tartans for Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Irish, and North American Surnames with Lists of Clan, Family, and District Tartans (9th expanded ed.). Heritage Books. ISBN 9780788452703.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) – Same comment as above; this is clearly pandering to and being continually updated for bogus "Irish tartans" being churned out for Americans; won't have anything useful for a historical WP article. And it's expensive anyway. (Seems to originally have been titled Tartans for the Irish! Suggested Tartans for Irish and Ulster Scots Names, though that might actualy be a largely redundant separate book.) The only use I can think of for this is for eventual articles on non-Scottish tartans, since it covers Welsh, Manx, Cornish, etc.
• Teall of Teallach, Gordon; Smith, Philip D., Jr. (1992). District Tartans. Shepheard-Walwyn. ISBN 9780856830853.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) – This is potentially useful, but I'm not ordering it until working on a district tartans side article. Never mind; I found it cheap, so I ordered it.
• Bowling, A. H. (1970). Scottish Regiments 1660-1914. "Uniforms" series. Almarks Publishing. – I have this.
• Fulton, Alexander. Scotland and Her Tartans: The Romantic Heritage of the Scottish Clans and Families. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 9780340572085. – Yet another clan tartans index; can't see this being useful.
• Bain, Robert; MacDougall, Margaret (1984) [1938]. The Clans and Tartans of Scotland (7th reprint of revised 1974 ed.). Fontana/Collins. ISBN 978-0004111179. – This is the classic clan tartan "flip book", in the latest edition I can identify. I ordered this one since I found it very cheap, and should probably have one of these (though will only need one, so might as well go with the original).
• Stewart, Jude (2015). Patternalia: An Unconventional History of Polka Dots, Stripes, Plaid, Camouflage, & Other Graphic Patterns. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781632861085. – This looks pretty thin on "history", versus pattern terminology.
• Ritchie, R. J. (1990). The Wilson Mills of Bannockburn. Bannockburn Heritage Group. – Little 32-page local-history publication; will be nearly impossible to find.
• Collie, George Francis, ed. (1948). Highland Dress. London: Penguin – via Internet Archive.
• McLeod, George (c. 1945). Highland Dress and How to Wear It. Calgary: George McLeod Department Store – via Internet Archive.
• MacKinnon, Charles Roy (1970). Tartans and Highland dress. Glasgow: Collins. ISBN 9780004111148 – via Internet Archive.
• McCulloch, Ian M. Sons of the Mountains: The Highland Regiments in the French and Indian War, 1756–1767. Vol. II. Fleischmanns, New York: Purple Mountain Press – via Internet Archive.
• Mackerlie, Peter Handyside (1862). An account of the Scottish regiments, with the statistics of each, from 1808. William P. Nimmo – via Internet Archive. – Has a few mentions of tartan in it, mostly pertaining to when regiments stopped/started wearing it or switched to/from trews.
• Macdonald, Fiona (2016). Scottish Tartan and Highland Dress. "A Very Peculiar History" series. Book House. ISBN 978-1908759894.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:50, 18 June 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 09:20, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Sources on ancient samples

Our article at Tarim mummies says "Textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who examined the tartan-style cloth, discusses similarities between it and fragments recovered from salt mines associated with the Hallstatt culture." But it doesn't cite Barber's own book for this, instead citing some paywalled paper. Weird. Anyway, this book is probably worth reviewing for details on the cloth. We've mentioned her briefly (as cited by Banks & de La Chapelle). This is the book:

• Barber, Elizabeth J. Wayland (1999). The Mummies of Ürümchi. London: Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-36897-4.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:38, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

A NYT article[54] based on her stuff says: "Tracing the origin of plaid cloth to Anatolia and the Caucasus, the steppe area north of the Black Sea, her conclusion is: 'Starting from the general vicinity of the Caucasus, one group went west, the other east.'" So, she's apparently got some detailed analysis on the spread of early tartan-type cloth, which presumably includes other pre-medieval finds than the ones we're mentioning already.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:44, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

A Guardian article[55] says: "Textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber says in her new book, The Mummies of Urumchi, that the woollen plaids discovered on the mummies could only have been woven on warp-weighted looms, which originated in Europe via the Middle East."

Also: "University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Irene Good, a specialist in early Eurasian textiles" apparently analyzed some of the cloth, and may have published something separately.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:15, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Dunbar (1979), pp. 48–49, says: The early textiles to be found in Scotland have been well described by Audrey S. Henshall in papers published in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1951. The actual specimens date from the Romano-British period to the seventeenth century and are to be seen in the Scottish National Museum of Antiquaries, Edinburgh. This means there are extant samples between the "Falkirk tartan" and the "Glen Affic tartan" that our article is not accounting for. Might take some work to track down Henshall's articles, as Dunbar did not cite them in detail. He quotes from one, but not specify which, nor provide the estimated date of the sample being described, so it's presently useless for our article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:27, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Kirkin' o' the tartan

WP has no article (or article section) on this curious ritual (common in the diaspora and actually traceable to Scotland, but long abandoned there). It should probably be addressed under Diaspora and globalisation, for lack of a better place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:44, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

A note on citation style, and WP:FRINGE approach

In overhauling this article (for a month or more already), I retained the original citation style, for cases in which we have to cite the same source at multiple pages, which was to use markup like {{cite book | ... |ref=SJD}} in an endnote, then in the text <ref>[[#SJD|Scarlett (1990)]], p. 37.</ref>. I thought about switching to {{sfn}} format, which accomplishes the same goal with less manual coding, but did not for the simple reason that the hand-coded style is more flexible. In particular, it is easy to do nested citations, e.g.: <ref>[[#SJD|Scarlett 1990]], p. 37, quoting: {{cite book | ... |ref=XYZ}}</ref> followed later by <ref>[[#XYZ|Whoever (date)]], p. xiv</ref> And it is also easy to add notes to a particular page(s) citation, which is something sfn format cannot handle.

Maybe more importantly, though, I have taken to attributing authors inline in the text in the style "Scarlett (1990)" – or in the event of two authors with the same surname, "D. W. Stewart (1893)". This is a style more often seen in science topics, but it is actually rather vital here because many authors published works with very similar titles, the titles sometimes changed between successive editions, and many authors produced more than one relevant work to cite. Scarlett himself advised this style for such reasons.

This topic is also unusually prone to "legends" being passed down from one author to another, originally with no basis but repeated so often (sometimes with something of a politicised motivation) they have acquired a sense of incontrovertible fact about them, at least in the minds of many of the readers who will arrive at our article after encountering wild claims about "ancient" clan tartans (or whatever) on some blog. In encyclopedic writing, this makes direct attribution often more important than it would be in some other textile-related article. It's important for the reader to be able to understand at first glance when a claim is coming from a romanticized Victorian work or from a work of modern scholarship, especially when these views are juxtaposed.

Part of the "job" of this article is to dispel such legends when modern research can dispense with them (and toward this end, I've labeled the "legends" as such when addressing them). This topic has to be approached with WP:FRINGE in mind, because a large number of unsupportable claims have been made about tartan history, and they are subject to intense and emotional faith on the part of some writers and many of our readers. (The irrationality and heat brought in defense of some of the tartan legends in online forums is what inspired me to overhaul this article in the first place, because it was doing nearly nothing to address them, and was even repeating a few of them based on weak sourcing; we have similar problems in other articles on Highland dress, but one thing at a time....) This is not just my opinion, but a warning issued by all modern writers on tartan, who observe a strong trend of legendry floating around the subject and passed from book to book.

This also means that more than the usual care has to be mustered in editorially evaluating source reliability; it is not enough to simply find a secondary source and cite it willy-nilly without carefully considering how it fits into the entire picture of tartan research, as a large number of those modern sources (especially Web-based and journalistic ones) rely on Victorian primary "research" that took great "Ossian"-flavoured liberties with the facts and their interpretation. This even applies to bodies one might assume are the most reliable, such as Scottish Register of Tartans and the previous tartan databases.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:33, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Irish tartan or alleged tartan

A while back, I ran into a source mentioning Irish nobles in Ulster having imported (and presumably wearing) Scottish tartan; but I didn't take note of it at the time and forgot which book or paper it was in.

There's a pervasive legend that the Irish were also commonly wearing tartan, and it needs to either be dispelled or proven correct at some point (see above RM discussion for how solidly some people believe that tartan is "Scottish and Irish"). Dunbar 1978 goes into some detail about how both the Irish and the Gaelic Scots (before the prevalence of the belted plaid) wore "mantles" (cloaks), over tunics (léine, often saffron-dyed), but (so far as I've read yet) does not indicate that the mantles were tartan. Various other writers I've already gone through said similar, and again did not mention evidence of the mantles being tartan.

Mackay (1924, p. 85) says:

Camden in his Britannia, first published in 1607, gives the following description of the Highland dress and armour : "They are clothed after the Irish fashion, in striped mantles, with their hair thick and long. In war they wear an iron head-piece and a coat of mail woven with iron rings; and they use bows and barbed arrows and broad swords."

So, that's one case of "striped".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:45, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Same author also makes it clear (perhaps without meaning to) that the term "mantle" was sometimes applied to plaids later:

The Rev. James Brome, in his travels over England, Scotland, and Wales, published at London in 1700, 8vo, gives (p. 183) the following description of the Highland dress and armour, which, although partly translated from Buchanan, has yet in it something original: "The Highlanders who inhabit the west part of the country ... go habited in mantles striped or streaked with divers colours about their shoulders, which they call pladden ....

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:06, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Found the Camden bit repeated in Dunbar (1979); incorporated it at end of Irish paragraph in "16th century" section. In lots and lots and lots of reading, this is the only period-piece I've seen suggest something that could be tartan in Ireland (and "striped" doesn't necessarily mean tartan); even this is contemporaneous with the Plantation of Ulster.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:02, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

On the source-access difference between Victorian and modern tartan research

At some point, need to add something into the article explaining that a primary reason for the Victorian/modern split on the "ancient clan tartans" legend is specifically because the National Records of Scotland (formerly National Archives of Scotland) has indexed and made available large numbers of key period manuscripts (like copious records of Wilson & Son of Bannockburn) that Victorian writers simply did not have ready if any access to. I think a few pages in Scarlett (1990) briefly address this, but I'll need to hunt them down again. And even he was writing before the public Internet existed; Newsome, Eslea McDonald, and few other very recent researchers may have something to say about it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:56, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

I've already quoted Thompson (1989) on the Victorian authors' bad habit of simply repeating whatever assertions they encountered in previous writing without much critical thinking being applied.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:01, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Term "Highland Revival period"

Resolved

 – Worked it in.

P. E. MacDonald uses this term fairly often, though with exact-date definitions that vary a little. "The years 1780-1840 are known as the Highland Revival period." [56] and "There are no known examples of Highland Revival clothing being retrospective, they are stylistically all contemporary with the fashion of the time c.1780-1840." [57], versus "In costume terms the Highland Revival refers to the period c1782-1837 in which, as the name suggests, there was a revival of interest in, and wearing of, Highland Dress following the Act Repealing the Proscription of Highland Dress in 1782." [58] (1837 was the beginning of Victoria's reign.)

Anyway, not sure whether to integrate it here at all or put it in Highland dress.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:26, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I integrated this briefly at the top of the Georgian section.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:04, 6 July 2023 (UTC)