The Earl of Erroll at Harlaw

A border is rarely drawn on a map. More often it is drawn on a single morning, on a piece of rising ground that nobody has noticed before, by a man whose office obliges him to stand where the ground is weakest and not move. He does not know, as the pibroch starts up on the brae opposite, that the line of Lowland speech and Lowland tenure in the north-east of Scotland is about to be fixed for the next six centuries at the place his right boot is planted.

THE CONSTABLE'S INHERITANCE

Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll is fifty-one years old in the summer of 1411, second Lord of Erroll, and High Constable of Scotland by a charter older than he is. The office came to the family in 1314 from King Robert at Bannockburn, in the hand of his great-grandfather, and has descended in unbroken male line ever since. It is not a courtier's title. The Constable holds the King's peace within four miles of the King's person, and on a field of battle in the King's absence he commands the right wing as of ancient right. The Hays sit at Slains on the cliff above the German Sea and at Erroll on the Carse of Gowrie, and their tenants farm the long Lowland belt that runs from the Tay to the Spey. For a hundred years they have been told what the office means; for a hundred years it has meant nothing harder than precedence at a coronation. This July it will mean something else.

Donald, Lord of the Isles, has been pressing east for the earldom of Ross all spring. He claims it through his wife. The Governor, Albany, has refused him. By midsummer Donald has crossed the Spey with the largest Hebridean army to come off the seaboard in living memory, ten thousand men by the scout's count, the galley-fighters of the centre and the broadsword companies of Lochaber and Duart on the wings. He has burned Dingwall, taken Inverness, and turned his face towards Aberdeen. The Lowland levies of Mar and the Mearns are called out under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, the King's nephew, a hard man with a hard past. Mar musters three thousand five hundred at Inverurie on the twenty-third of July. The Constable rides north from Slains with three hundred and fifty of his own Erroll men, picks up four hundred and fifty Lowland spearmen on the road, and reaches the ground above the Urie burn in the late light of the long evening.

THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-FOURTH

It is twenty past nine on the morning of Saint James's Eve, heavy summer light, no wind. The ground above the village of Harlaw is rising grass between two burns, the Urie on the west and a smaller water on the east, with the Lochter bog closing the southern flank. He is in plate and mail, the Hay arms in argent and gules on the surcoat, the unicorns of the office at his shoulder. He has on the right wing eight hundred men of his own and the Aberdeenshire spear, and two burgh-foot companies of Aberdeen on the outer flank under the Provost, Sir Robert Davidson, in his civic harness with the burgh banner. The Highland line is forming two cables to the west on the brae above the burn. Donald's galley-fighters in the centre, the men of Lochaber on the left under Lochiel, the MacLeans of Duart and the MacKenzies on the right under Red Hector of the Battles. The numerical reckoning is three to one against the Lowland line. The pibroch begins.

A SECOND AT HARLAW

The Constable knows what is coming at him before it leaves the brae. The right is the open flank, and the open flank is where the broadswords will run. The Aberdeen burgh-foot have never seen a Highland charge; they are fishmongers and skinners and the sons of skinners, and they will hear the pibroch and feel the ground shake under three thousand feet at the run, and the Provost will be in the front rank in his merchant's harness because he is the kind of man he is, and they will look to the right of the line for the reason to stand. There is no reason on the right of the line but him. He is fifty-one, in his hereditary office and on his own grand-tenant's grain, and the office was given at Bannockburn for a reason. He has, in this second, the alternative of refusing the open flank, of pulling the wing inward against the Lochter bog and letting the burgh-foot anchor on Mar's centre, which is what a cautious commander would do and what the chronicles would never have remembered. He does not pull the wing inward. He goes to the front of his line, where the men can see the unicorns on the surcoat, and he speaks in the Aberdeen Scots they will understand. We will hold here this day. We will not break. The Constable of Scotland is on this hill. It is not a speech that survives in any chronicle. It survives in the Hay tradition and in the bothy songs of the Garioch, which is a longer memory than parchment.

THE CHARGE

The MacLeans came on at twenty past ten with the targe and the broadsword, at the run, with Red Hector of the Battles at the head. The Erroll line did not break. Sir Alexander Irving of Drum, on the right of the right, took Red Hector in single combat in front of the Hay men at midday; by the country tradition they killed each other on the same stroke, and they are buried in adjacent graves in the Drum churchyard ten miles south of the field. The action ran through the afternoon at the push of pike and the cut of broadsword without either line giving. Donald's centre pressed Mar's centre and Mar took a wound to the head and stayed in the saddle. Sir James Scrimgeour, Constable of Dundee, was killed on the centre. The Provost Davidson was killed on the outer right at the head of his burgh men, in his merchant's harness, with the burgh banner still standing over him. The Highland line withdrew across the burn at sunset and went west in the night. The Lowland line slept on the field. At first light on the twenty-fifth, Mar was still in the saddle on the rising ground, and the right wing was where it had been at twenty past nine the morning before.

THE QUIET OF THE BURN

Donald rode west in the dark with the Hebridean centre. He had come east for the earldom of Ross with the largest army the Isles had put into the field in a generation, and he had not been beaten and he had not won. The Spey would not be crossed again going east. The MacLeans of Duart took their dead off the brae and carried Red Hector home to Mull by sea. The Lochaber men took the long road back through the Cairngorm passes. About a thousand Highland dead lay in the gorse above the Urie. Donald had four years to live, and the years would be spent at Ardtornish on the sound, looking west to the islands he could still hold and not east to the earldom he could not. The galleys that had brought the army up the firths in the spring went home empty.

THE FIELD AT FIRST LIGHT

The Constable was on the rising ground at first light on the twenty-fifth of July with the sun coming up over the German Sea behind him. About a thousand Lowland dead in front of his line, the Provost among them, the burgh banner taken up and folded by the burgh men who were left. Three days later the Aberdeen burgh-troop came up the road from the south, in arms, to support a field that had already been held. The country called it the Reid Harlaw, the red harlaw, for the colour of the gorse where the right wing had stood, and the name went into the bothy songs and the ballads of the Garioch and stayed there for four hundred years. The Lowland belt of Aberdeenshire and Angus did not become Gaelic again. The line of Lowland speech and Lowland tenure that runs today from the Tay to the Spey runs along it because of a morning on the rising ground above the Urie burn, and because the right of the line did not move.

THE OFFICE

Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll lived another twenty-five years. His grandson William was raised to the earldom of Erroll in 1453, which is the title the family has carried since. The hereditary office of the Constable of Scotland, given at Bannockburn in 1314, has descended in unbroken male-line succession from the morning of Harlaw to the present day, and is the only one of the great medieval offices of state of Scotland that has been continuously held by the same family from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first. The 24th Earl of Erroll, Merlin Sereld Victor Gilbert Hay, holds the office now; he is the Constable in the Court of the Lord Lyon, and at the coronation of the King he walks at the King's right hand, immediately after the sovereign. The Harlaw Monument was put up by the Aberdeen burgh on the highest point of the field at the five-hundredth anniversary in 1911, in pink Aberdeen granite, with the names of the Lowland fallen cut into it and the Provost Davidson's name at the head. The Highland fallen were not put on the monument by Aberdeen civic decision; a second stone, put up by the Friends of Harlaw at the six-hundredth in 2011, stands at a short remove and carries their names. The two stones are within sight of each other on the rising ground above the Urie burn, and the gorse between them goes red in late July.

A border is rarely drawn on a map. It is drawn, more often, on the morning a man whose office obliges him to stand where the ground is weakest decides not to move. Six hundred years on, the right wing of the line is still pink granite on a hill above the Garioch, and the gorse between the two stones goes red on the anniversary.