County Cork tartans and Arsenal tartan

[O'Callaghan]

As Matt and various others have pointed out, the Irish county tartans are a purely Scottish invention. The colours you mention are probable taken from the Cork (city and county) crest, which is two towers (red) with an orangey-yellow background. The towers are usually depicted on two hills (green) and there is a ship sailing between the towers (the sea is blue). Hence the 4 colours you mention for the Edgar tartan. However, the land and sea are not always coloured, which could give you just red, yellow and orange. I haven't seen that tartan though.

Now, if you were to ask a Corkman what were the County Cork colours, red and white would be the answer because those are the GAA colours. I doubt very much if the designers of the tartans realised just how important the GAA teams are to each county's identity. The soccer strips have been several colours, though not a lot of orange has appeared....

A degree of ignorance of Ireland, especially the Republic, is displayed by the designer of the tartans through several clues which I won't mention here as it could veer towards the political...

This all makes sense. I even knew about the GAA colours, but Morton Mills claimed to be using the county crest colours and not the GAA colours.

I didn't have the Morton Mills tartan in front of me when I posted (I was wearing the other one, though), and it now appears that the Morton Mills version does have blue in it, and the orange I saw in it was probably the effect of a yellow stripe superimposed on red to give an overall impression of orange.

So, probably both use the colours of the crest, which from what you say is the same for the city and the county. I wonder if this might also be true of some or all of the other 31 counties? It would be exhausting to look at them all.

[billmcc]

...Morton Mills...

To clear up any confusion, the tartan maker being discussed is named Marton Mills.
Here is the website: http://www.martonmills.com/

[thanmuwa]

So, probably both use the colours of the crest, which from what you say is the same for the city and the county. I wonder if this might also be true of some or all of the other 31 counties? It would be exhausting to look at them all.

Well, a brief eyeball comparison of this page and the edgar tartan page mentioned above shows quite a few differences. For example, Wexford (purple and yellow are the predominant county colours, whereas the tartan is national colours, more appropriate to Offaly), Tipperary and my own county of Westmeath all seem quite different, Offaly should really be almost the same as the national tartan but it is oddly different, Dublin colours are really some lovely shades of blue with red and yellow on the crest which could have made a lovely tartan, but the edgar tartan is green, brown, red and black (and IMHO horrible) .... in short there seems to be little if any correlation......

[O'Callaghan]

Well, a brief eyeball comparison of this page and the edgar tartan page mentioned above shows quite a few differences. For example, Wexford (purple and yellow are the predominant county colours, whereas the tartan is national colours, more appropriate to Offaly), Tipperary and my own county of Westmeath all seem quite different, Offaly should really be almost the same as the national tartan but it is oddly different, Dublin colours are really some lovely shades of blue with red and yellow on the crest which could have made a lovely tartan, but the edgar tartan is green, brown, red and black (and IMHO horrible) .... in short there seems to be little if any correlation......

So perhaps it is only Cork where both Marton Mills and House of Edgar match the crest. Just as well that my folks came from Co Cork, then. However, Marton Mills does use a red Background for Cork, which seems more appropriate, whereas Edgar has more green.