All in the (Robertson) Family (the tartan, not the TV comedy)

[OC Richard]

At least the versions and thread-counts given in The Setts Of The Scottish Tartans of Cunningham and Robertson are clearly different, not just in colour but also in structure.

Cunningham is said to be a Vestiarium Scoticum (Allen brothers) design, and it does follow their oft-used 2-stripe format, in this case two fat black stripes on a red ground. In between the two fat black stripes there's a narrow black stripe, and in the red field there's a white stripe flanked by two fine blue lines. (Take a look at VS designs like Barclay, Brodie, Bruce, Cameron (red), Erskine, MacKinnon, MacLachlan (yellow), Ramsay, Oliphant, and Wemyss for more examples.)

Robertson, while superficially similar, has a more complicated structure: wide bands of green and blue, the two bands flanked by narrow blue stripes, and a green/white/green triple stripe in the middle of the red ground.

In any case many "modern colours" weaves have blue and green so dark that they can hardly be distinguished from each other, or sometimes even from black, in photographs. I suspect your Chief photo is an example of that.