Click the tartan to view its entry in The Scottish Registers of Tartans which includes registration details, restrictions, and registrant information.
Unregistered tartans may link to one of the web's online design environments for similar information.
For any questions about reproduction of designs or weaving of these tartans, please contact the registrant directly or via this website.
Lumberjack Day
"He's a lumberjack and he's OK!
He sleeps all night and he works all day."
~ Lumberjack Song, Monty Python, 1974
For those in North America, this familiar Rob Roy check tartan has acquired a completely different identity! It may be called any one of the following: buffalo plaid, buffalo check, lumberjack plaid, lumberjack check, red-and-black check, or simply lumberjack flannel.
There is a linguistic difference here as well. In Scotland, the pattern is a tartan, while plaid traditionally refers to a garment or length of tartan cloth. In North America, plaid became the common term for checked patterns themselves.
The Scottish pattern predates its North American lumberjack fame, but in 1850 Pennsylvania woolen manufacturer Woolrich introduced its red-and-black Buffalo Check shirt as durable outdoor workwear, helping make the pattern a fixture of the American outdoors.
There is also a more romantic tale that Scottish trader Jock McCluskey brought the red-and-black MacGregor pattern to North America and traded tartan blankets for buffalo hides—possibly explaining the name buffalo check.
"Lumberjack" is the wonderfully evocative North American term, although the people doing the work are generally called loggers today; in French-speaking Canada, bûcherons; and in Britain, forestry workers, timber fellers, or simply fellers. Australia and New Zealand have their own traditions of timber cutters, bushmen and woodchoppers.
The old lumber camps developed a language all their own. A formidable logger might be a timber beast; high riggers climbed enormous trees; river pigs shepherded logs downstream; and a widowmaker was a dangerously suspended limb or treetop. This dangerous, exhausting work produced a wonderfully colorful folklore of camp slang, tall tales and larger-than-life characters.
Some of those old logging skills eventually became a sport. Lumberjack and timber-sports competitions feature events such as axe chopping, crosscut sawing, pole climbing, axe throwing, boom running and log rolling. One of the great gatherings is the annual Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, held since 1960 ahd this year, and this year’s Stihl Timbersports World Championship will take place October 30–31 in Stuttgart, Germany!
So whatever you're wearing today, and whatever you call it, celebrate Lumberjack Day with a lumberjack's favourite flapjacks and maple syrup—and, depending on your talents, some log rolling, axe throwing, or just a tall tale or two! ❤️ 🖤 ❤️ 🌲 🌲 🌲 🪓 🪓 🪓 🥞 🥞 🥞
This pattern has come to be loosely associated with the giant mythological lumberjack of North American folklore, Paul Bunyan, whose legendary exploits revolve around tall tales of his superhuman labors which include creating Minnesota's ten thousand lakes (including Lake Bemidji, which resembles Paul's giant footprint), and digging the Grand Canyon, by dragging his axe behind him!
Paul is customarily accompanied in these exploits by his companion, Babe or Blue, a giant ox, who was measured seven feet (or seven ax-handles) between his eyes, and fourteen feet between his horns.
The character of Paul Bunyan originated in the oral traditions of North American loggers, possibly related to a real person who figured in the 1837 Papineau Rebellion in Canada.
In the Two Mountain region in St. Eustache, Canada, the local French Canadians revolted against their new ruler, the Queen of England. Many local loggers joined the cause refusing to surrender to the English troops sent to quash the rebellion. The loggers armed themselves with axes, mattocks and large wooden forks they had steam bent into hooks. One of the rebels, a large bearded mountain man named Paul Bunyan, cut a wide swath amongst the Queen's troops. This Paul survived the rebellion and became highly respected among the loggers of the region for his deeds in battle. It is believed that exaggerrated tales of this Paul, along with those of other loggers, melded into the bunkhouse tales told by loggers to amuse themselves and impress tenderfoots.
Paul Bunyan tales were told by the fires of bunkhouses in the northern camps from Wisconsin to Maine, from Minnesota to Oregon, to Washington and California for decades.
It is believed that this particular tartan/plaid was introduced to North America by a descendant of Rob Roy - 'Jock McCluskey,' a sometimes lawman, bounty hunter, fur trapper, gold miner and eventually, Indian trader.
For more on the origins and etymology of the "buffalo plaid," click Paul and Babe, shown in this 1996 USA stamp.