Clan MacFarlane (Scottish Gaelic: Clann Phàrlain ) is a Highland Scottish clan. Descended from the medieval Earls of Lennox, the MacFarlanes occupied the land forming the western shore of Loch Lomond from Tarbet up-wards. From Loch Sloy, a small sheet of water near the foot of Ben Vorlich, they took their war cry of Loch Slòigh. The clan was noted for the night time cattle raiding of neighbouring clan lands, (particularly those of Clan Colquhoun), and as such a full moon became known locally as "MacFarlane's Lantern". The ancestral lands of the clan were held by the chiefs until they were sold off for debts, in 1767. Since 1866 the chiefship has been dormant, no one having claimed or obtained rematriculation of the Chief Arms making Clan MacFarlane a supposed Armigerous clan. History Origins Clan MacFarlane claims descent from the original Earls of Lennox, though the ultimate origin of these earls is murky and has been debated. The nineteenth-century Scottish antiquary George Chalmers, in his Caledonia, quoting the twelfth century English chronicler Symeon of Durham, wrote that the original Earls of Lennox descended from an Anglo-Saxon – Arkil, son of Egfrith. This Arkil, a Northumbrian chief, was said to have fled to Scotland from the devastation caused by the Harrying of the North by William the Conqueror, and later received control of the Lennox district from Malcolm III of Scotland, though alternative theories state that the original Earls of Lennox may have been of Gaelic descent. These two views are not mutually exclusive, as what is now southern Scotland and northern England had, in the post-Roman and early Mediaeval era, been a flux of Gaelic, Brittonic, Scandinavian and Germanic ethnicities. Clan MacFarlane claims its descent from the original line of the Earls of Lennox, through Gille Chriosd, brother of Maol Domhnaich, Earl of Lennox, who received in charter, "de terris de superiori Arrochar de Luss", the lands of Arrochar which the MacFarlanes held for centuries until the death of the last chief. Gille Chriosd's son, Donnchadh, also obtained charters for his lands from the Earl of Lennox, and appears in the Ragman Rolls as "Dunkan Makilcrift de Leuenaghes" (Duncan son of Gilchrist of Lennox). Donnchadh's grandson was Parlan (or Bartholomew), from whom the clan takes its name from. There is no contemporary evidence of this Parlan or his elided father, only centuries-retrospective assertions that private documentation existed at the time