By Rafe Calder
A tartan is a pattern. The Scottish Register of Tartans is a list of patterns. Neither is a guarantee of where a piece of cloth was woven, who owns the design or how old it is, and a good deal of the confusion around tartan comes from treating one as the other.
What a tartan is
Wikipedia defines tartan as a patterned cloth of crossing horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours. In North America it is often called plaid, which the article says comes from the Gaelic plaide, meaning blanket, and originally named a rectangular garment.
The pattern of a particular tartan is called its sett. The traditional cloth, the article says, is a tight, staggered 2/2 twill of worsted wool: the weft goes over two warp threads and under two, which makes a diagonal rib. A tartan is recorded by counting the threads of each colour in the sett, and the article says notation for the pivot threads varies.
The word itself is unsettled. Wikipedia lists three possible roots, the French tiretaine for linsey-woolsey cloth, the Gaelic tarsainn for across, and the French tartarin for Tartar cloth, and settles on none.
A register with a date
According to Wikipedia, the Scottish Register of Tartans Act 2008 passed the Scottish Parliament on 9 October 2008 and received royal assent on 13 November 2008. The register’s website launched on 5 February 2009. The register’s own site gives the same launch date and says it was created by the Scottish Parliament in 2008, and is run by National Records of Scotland with advice from the Court of the Lord Lyon and tartan industry representatives. National Records of Scotland describes itself as an executive agency of the Scottish Government.
In April 2025 a National Records of Scotland news item recorded its 10,000th tartan, 131 Argyle, registered by a school to mark its history since 1869.
How many are in it?
The sources give three different answers. National Records of Scotland, in its 2025 news item, says the register holds over 10,000 registered tartans. The register’s own about page says only “thousands”. Wikipedia says the database holds at least 7,000 from earlier registries and that the total is uncertain.
What registering involves
Wikipedia says registration is paid. It says a new design must be sufficiently different from every previously recorded tartan, that the applicant must supply a woven sample, a photograph or an accurate digital image, and that a name which implies clan or official endorsement needs the applicant to have the authority to use it. The register’s site says that to register a new design you need an account, and that searching needs none.
What registering does not do
Here the sources are plain. Wikipedia says registration does not automatically grant copyright in the usual sense. Applicants can record an asserted copyright, and can record trademark claims. What registration provides, it says, is evidence of a design’s existence and date. Usage restrictions can be recorded, but the article says no statute enforces them, which leaves only informal “tartan etiquette”.
The register’s own site adds a caution. Its database merges records from three earlier organisations, that data is still being checked, and inaccuracies may remain. The earlier bodies used different criteria, so a tartan recognised by one was not always recognised by the others.
A critic cited by Wikipedia noted that the register accepts registrants from outside Scotland and has no compulsory licensing for Scottish production. Our reading: a registered name tells you the design is on file. It does not tell you the cloth was woven in Scotland.
The clan question
Wikipedia says that from 1951 to 1992 the Lord Lyon King of Arms recorded 74 tartans, counting minor variations, usually at the request of clan chiefs or organisations, and that the office no longer records them directly. All of them are in the register.
On older claims the Tartan article is cautious. A claim that tartan was worn in Scotland as far back as 1440 has not been matched by later researchers. The idea that a Lennox tartan came from a portrait of about 1575 “seems to be legend”, since no such portrait has been identified. The notion that red tartans were designed to hide blood is described as a legend, and colour meanings in general as a modern idea. Balmoral, dated 1853, is described as a royal tartan with two greys as an under-check.
The oldest piece
V&A Dundee reported that a piece found in a peat bog in Glen Affric about forty years earlier had been tested at the SUERC Radiocarbon Laboratory. The range was 1500 to 1655 AD, with 1500 to 1600 the most probable. The museum calls it the oldest known surviving specimen of true tartan in Scotland, about 55 by 43 centimetres, and says no artificial dyes were found.
V\&A Dundee says four colours were seen, green and brown and possibly red and yellow, with indigo or woad confirmed in the green. Atlas Obscura, a travel magazine, says the pattern was mainly red and yellow with green and black overstripes.
The Falkirk piece, found in 1933 in a pot with about 2,000 Roman coins according to Atlas Obscura, is dated to the third century. V&A Dundee calls it a simpler check of undyed yarns and not true tartan. Atlas Obscura reports that some experts agree and at least one still regards it as Scotland’s oldest.
Dates in order
- Third century AD: the Falkirk piece, according to V&A Dundee.
- 1500 to 1600 AD, most probably: the Glen Affric piece, according to V&A Dundee.
- 1853: Balmoral, according to Wikipedia.
- 1951 to 1992: Lyon Court records 74 tartans, according to Wikipedia.
- 9 October and 13 November 2008: Act passed, then royal assent, according to Wikipedia.
- 5 February 2009: register’s website launches.
- April 2025: 10,000th tartan recorded, according to National Records of Scotland.
What kind of sources these are
The register’s own site and National Records of Scotland speak for the register. Wikipedia is an open encyclopaedia and gave the legal detail and the history. V&A Dundee is a museum. Atlas Obscura is a travel magazine.
What we left out
We left out every fee and every living person named in the sources. We left out the period after the 1745 rising, since it is a story of violence and we could not source it plainly. We left out the nineteenth-century story of how clan tartans were assigned, because the Tartan article gave too little to source it.
Quick answers
What is a sett? According to Wikipedia, the pattern of a particular tartan, built from crossing stripes of colour.
Does registering a tartan protect it in law? According to Wikipedia, registration gives evidence of a design’s existence and date but no automatic copyright, and no statute enforces recorded usage restrictions.
Who runs the Scottish Register of Tartans? National Records of Scotland, an executive agency of the Scottish Government, according to its own site.
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