  We have used Washington photometry for 90 star cluster candidates of small
angular size -typically ~ 11" in radius- distributed within nine selected
regions in the inner disc of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) to disentangle
whether they are genuine physical system, and to estimate the ages for the
confirmed clusters. In order to avoid a misleading interpretation of the
cluster colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), we applied a subtraction procedure to
statistically clean them from field star contamination. Out of the 90 candidate
clusters studied, 61 of them resulted to be genuine physical systems, whereas
the remaining ones were classified as possible non- clusters since either their
CMDs and/or the distribution of stars in the respective fields do not resemble
those of stellar aggregates. We statistically show that ~ (13 +- 6)% of the
catalogued clusters in the inner disc could be possible non-clusters,
independently of their deprojected distances. We derived the ages for the
confirmed clusters from the fit of theoretical isochrones to the cleaned
cluster CMDs. The derived ages resulted to be in the age range 7.8 < log(t) <
9.2. Finally, we built cluster frequencies for the different studied regions
and found that there exists some spatial variation of the LMC CF throughout the
inner disc. Particularly, the innermost field contains a handful of clusters
older than ~ 2 Gyr, while the wider spread between different CFs has taken
place during the most recent 50 Myr of the galaxy lifetime.
