book: World Tartans by Iain Zaczek

[OC Richard]

I thought I should revive and add to this thread, because recently by chance I was looking at something in this book, and noticed yet another error.

So I hauled out The Setts of the Scottish Tartans, 2nd Edition, by Donald C Stewart FSA Scot (Shepheard-Walwyn London 1974) which I pretty much take as Gospel, and started comparing.

Wowza. Even though only maybe around half of the tartans in Zaczek are in Setts, I found a huge number of errors. I checked Zaczek and Setts against the tartans currently made by major mills.

A suprising number of the illustrations in Zaczek simply show a different tartan. It would take a lot of searching to find out what these really are, but anyhow the following have some random incorrect tartan shown:

Black Watch (come on, how could you mess up this one?)
Caledonia
"Douglas Ancient Dress" (sort of like the VS Douglas)
Fraser Hunting
Grant
2nd Kennedy tartan shown
MacAllister
MacArthur
Ogilvy
Rothesay
Ruthven
Stewart of Galloway

Then there's the colour errors.

Several have the area, band, or line which should be crimson instead shown in red. This really ruins the effect of MacNab for one.

These are:

Crawford
Dalziel
Lindsay
MacBean/MacBain
MacNab
Rose

A few tartans with the usual blue & green background have the blue changed to purple:

Colquhoun
Dundas
Ferguson

Some other colour errors:

Baird: triple purple stripes shown red
Fletcher: red line in centre of green area shown black
MacDuff: two black lines changed to sky blue
MacLean of Duart: the light blue/mid blue/light blue portion has been changed to an unbroken light blue band
Ramsay: pair of crimson lines shown black

The oddest colour error is with Cranston: the background colours light green and dark green have been reversed.

Then there's pattern errors.

Anderson: two red lines in the green area are shown tripled
Chisholm: two extra red lines have been added in the green band
MacAlpine: Setts shows no blue, just a black pattern on green, just as House of Edgar makes it. But Zaczek shows a tartan with added blue bands, which Strathmore and Lochcarron make
MacDonald of Staffa: several errors in this very complex tartan. House of Edgar makes the correct Smith 1850 pattern
MacDougall: the tartan shown is a bit like one of the four MacDougall tartans shown in Setts
MacRae: six blue lines on the red band are shown as two green lines.

Then there's various oddities:

Four versions of Culloden are shown, only one the original purple & yellow
Cumming: the cluster of three bands green/red/black, which are rather wide in the source (Smibert 1850) and in Lochcarron's version, in Zaczek are dramatically shrunk, following the way House of Edgar weaves it
Morrison: only a modern red variant is shown