There has been some speculation that the MacLarens did not come out as a clan in the ’45. There is no documentation that supports or denies this so no definitive answer can be given. But it is very probable that we did as our group would have been small, some probably following Donald MacLaren from Balquhidder.
Because the clans tended to stick with their fellow clansmen, this proved problematic to the officers trying to consolidate and organise their forces. As Stuart Reid quotes in his chapter The Jacobite Army At Culloden, Colonel O’Sullivan wrote “All was confused…They must go by tribes; such a chiefe of a tribe had sixty men, another thirty, another twenty, more or lesse; they would not mix nor separate…” Reid goes on to say that under O’Sullivan’s command the smaller units were “attached to larger ones”. An example given is that of John MacKinnon of MacKinnon who brought a small contingent from Skye. O’Sullivan attached them to the Keppoch MacDonalds to form a larger regiment.1 So it’s entirely possible that MacLarens came out as a clan but were merged into another group. Many of these smaller groups, like the MacKinnons bear no mention on stones at Culloden likely for this reason. The same could be said for the MacLarens who appear on the Appin stone but do not have a stone of their own as a clan.
So although we cannot say for certain that the MacLarens came out as a clan, it is certainly possible that they did.
- Reid, Stuart, ‘The Jacobite Army at Culloden’, Culloden The History and Archaeology of the Last Clan Battle, Tony Pollard (ed.), Pen & Sword Military: Yorkshire, 2009, p. 44 âŠī¸