Buchanan

The Clan Buchanan Society describes the sett as asymmetric, which is unusual among clan tartans. This record's colour list is blue and green with black, red, yellow and white, and the hex values are approximate. The society says the Ancient shade uses softer, natural-type dyes and that weathered and muted shades also exist.

The Buchanan Society lists the original dyes as elder, broom and alum for blue, iris leaf for green, alder bark for black, crab apple for yellow, rock lichen for red and natural white wool. That is the society's description, and the dyers' records behind it were not seen.

No threadcount is given here. The register shows threadcounts only to logged-in users, and the counts in secondary databases differ between Buchanan records.

The register credits Wilsons of Bannockburn as designer, dated 1850. Date here is the date of the printed record, not proof of when the weave first appeared. It says the Smiths of Mauchline printed it that year with mid-blue instead of the original light blue.

The Smiths said the pattern "seems to be universally considered the genuine Buchanan Tartan". That is a mid-19th-century opinion about a commercial pattern, not evidence of use by the clan in earlier centuries.

Buchanan - 1842 comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum, published by the Sobieski Stuart brothers and said to be copied from a 16th-century manuscript. The register says that claim was later proven fraudulent. The tartan has nonetheless had a life of its own, and the register records the chief's 2022 recognition of it.

The 1850 sett has since appeared in Modern, Ancient and weathered colourings, and Hunting and Dress versions exist. The clan society lists these as accepted.

The register names the main record Buchanan - 1850. Other names in circulation include Buchanan Modern, Buchanan Ancient, Buchanan Hunting and Buchanan Dress. The clan society separates two official tartans (Buchanan and Buchanan of Leny) from six accepted ones, and says it does not endorse a number of other tartans sold under the Buchanan name.

The Buchanan Society, a separate body, speaks of Weathered, Hunting, Ancient and Modern shades. The two societies do not use identical lists, so the label on a cloth does not settle its status.

The Clan Buchanan Society says the Lord Lyon confirmed John Michael Baillie-Hamilton Buchanan of that Ilk as chief in August 2018, the first since 1681. The register ties both 1850 and 1842 setts to that chief's 2022 authorisation, which is a current statement, not a historical one.

The clan society says sept membership is the chief's prerogative. Sept lists were largely compiled by 19th-century societies and are contested, so a surname on such a list is not by itself evidence of a right to this tartan.

The clan society says the Buchanan Modern is the version for someone declaring allegiance to the clan, and that Ancient, weathered and muted palettes are acceptable if the sett and colours are followed.

The register's date of 1850 is the date of a printed book, and a longer trail exists. A Scottish Tartans Authority note on Buchanan describes a cloak of about 1800 to 1810 in the collection of National Museums Scotland, in hard tartan made by William Wilson and Son of Bannockburn. In that piece the pattern is already asymmetric, the red, green and yellow blocks are close to equal in size, and the blue is Wilsons' light blue, not the mid to dark blue common now. The cloth also contains a weaving error in the light blue.

The same note says that small asymmetric checks of this kind were among Wilsons' fancy patterns, often identified by number, with some named later after a place, person or event. It says the pattern was known as Buchanan by 1831, because Logan's 1831 book includes it, and that Wilsons were calling a variation of it Buchanan by 1838. It calls the pattern unusual among clan tartans for being asymmetric and for its amount of yellow, which it says was uncommon before the Sobieski Stuart designs of the 1840s.

This page read the note through a search extract, not the full PDF, and has not seen the cloak, so these dates are level C pointers to be checked against the museum record. Two things follow if they hold. The light blue on the cloak matches what the register says the Smiths replaced with mid-blue in 1850, which supports the register's account of that change. And the name Buchanan was in use for the pattern by 1831, nineteen years before the register's date. None of the sources read says who gave the pattern the name or whether the family had adopted it before the Smiths printed it.

The hunting version has a separate documented source. Kinloch Anderson, a kiltmaker, says it comes from the Scott Adie collection, a book of manufacturers' samples dated 1850 and sold at auction about 1960, and that the samples are thought to represent the tartans on sale between 1840 and 1850. That is a commercial, level D statement. It places the hunting colours in the same trade decade as the Smith printing and does not show clan use.