Clan MacLaren

Clan MacLaren, in Gaelic Clann Labhrainn, is a Perthshire clan whose heartland was the old parish of Balquhidder, running from the Braes of Balquhidder to Loch Earn and taking in Lochearnhead and Strathyre. The district was long known as the Country of the MacLaurins. The name derives from Labhran, or Laurence, recorded as Abbot of Achtow in Balquhidder in the thirteenth century, and the chiefly house is connected heraldically to the Celtic Earls of Strathearn. Three names in the Ragman Rolls of 1296 are generally cited as the clan’s earliest documentary trace, though whether all three are MacLarens is disputed.

The clan’s decisive misfortune was legal rather than military. As the Earldom of Strathearn passed out of Gaelic hands after 1344, the MacLarens were left occupying Balquhidder without title to it. A MacGregor raid in 1558 devastated the parish and killed the aged chief along with many of the clan, and the chiefship was eclipsed from that point. MacLarens are recorded at Flodden in 1513, with Montrose in the civil wars, at Killiecrankie in 1689, and in the Appin Regiment at Prestonpans, Falkirk Muir and Culloden in the rising of 1745. Landless and unregistered after the 1672 Act requiring armigerous families to record their arms with the Lord Lyon, the clan was effectively chiefless for close to three centuries. In late 1957 Donald MacLaren petitioned the Court of the Lord Lyon and matriculated the chiefly arms as MacLaren of MacLaren and Achleskine, the first Balquhidder MacLaren to hold chiefly arms of record, and bought back ancestral ground including Creag an Tuirc.

The MacLaren tartan

The MacLaren sett is one of the relatively few that can be traced to a named weaver rather than to a Victorian book. The Scottish Register of Tartans records MacLaren as a pattern of Wilsons of Bannockburn, the Stirlingshire firm whose pattern books supplied most of the tartan trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, and records a second distinct Wilsons sett under the name MacLaren Regent. A MacLaren Dress sett is recorded as a later named design, and there are modern variants from D. C. Dalgliesh of Selkirk and a dance tartan.

The MacLaren tartan has an unusual second life: it was adopted in 1921 as the tartan of the Scout Association, in honour of William de Bois Maclaren, whose donation bought Gilwell Park.

A note on honesty: MacLaren Ancient and MacLaren Weathered are not separate tartans. They are the same Wilsons threadcount woven in lighter or muted dye shades, and the Register holds no separate record for either, nor for a MacLaren Hunting sett. Being a Wilsons pattern makes the MacLaren sett better documented than most, but it is still a commercial weaving-trade design of the decades after the 1745 rising, not an ancient clan uniform.

Clan facts

References

1. MacLaren tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. History — The Clan MacLaren Society
3. The History of Clan MacLaren