Clan Hay

On the morning of the twenty-fourth of July 1411, on the rising ground above the head of the Garioch, twenty miles north-west of Aberdeen, the Lowland-Norman levies of Aberdeenshire and Angus, under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, met a Highland-Hebridean army of about ten thousand under Donald, Lord of the Isles, in the most consequential battle fought in north-east Scotland in the post-Bruce century. Donald had been pressing east for the earldom of Ross. Mar's hastily levied army of three thousand had three of the great Lowland constables on the field. The High Constable of Scotland, Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, son of the second Lord of Erroll, in his fifty-first year, in his hereditary office and on his own ground, held the right wing of Mar's line. The action was, by every contemporary account, fought to a standstill on the strath of Harlaw at the cost of about a thousand dead a side. Donald withdrew north-west overnight; Mar held the field. The Lowland-speaking belt of Aberdeenshire and Angus would not be reabsorbed into a Gaelic west again. The Hay tradition has it that the day held because Erroll held the right.

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