Inverlochy

Some grievances are too old to be settled in a courtroom and too specific to be settled in a war. They wait, instead, for a single morning of clear weather and a commander willing to march in winter. When that morning comes, a century of administrative dispossession is undone in two hours, and the men who undo it do so not as soldiers of a king, though they carry his commission, but as the sons of fathers who lost particular islands on particular dates and have been counting the years since.

THE SON OF COLL CIOTACH

He is Alasdair MacColla MacDonald, born in Antrim about 1620, son of Coll Ciotach, Coll the left-handed, last of the great Hebridean galley-captains of the senior MacDonald line. His father's people held Islay until 1614, when the Campbells of Argyll, by patient writ and timely garrison, took the island in the king's name and kept it in their own. The MacDonalds of the south Isles have lived on other men's land since. Alasdair is a giant of a man, by the description of those who fought beside him and against him, left-handed like his father, trained in the Irish wars of the 1640s where he learned a single tactical instrument so well that it carries his name in the manuals: the Highland charge, one volley at thirty yards and then the targe and the broadsword. In the summer of 1644 he crossed from Antrim with sixteen hundred Irish and met James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, in the hills above Blair Atholl. Montrose had the king's commission and no army. MacColla had an army and no country. They went to work together.

THE MARCH OVER THE LAIRIG LEACACH

On the twenty-ninth of January 1645 they were at the south end of Loch Ness, with Argyll's army of three thousand at Inverlochy behind them and a second covenanting force under Seaforth on the Inverness road ahead. Montrose chose neither road. He turned south-east into the hills, crossed the high pass of the Lairig Leacach in snow, came down Glen Roy, climbed again over the shoulder of Ben Nevis, and on the night of the thirty-first stood on Meall an t-Suidhe above the head of Loch Linnhe. Thirty-six hours of marching in frost without fires. The men chewed oatmeal cold from their plaids and slept in their plaids on the snow. Behind MacColla on the shoulder, in the dark, sat MacIain of Glencoe, the Captain of Clanranald, Donald MacDonald of Keppoch, John MacDonell of Glengarry, the Stewarts of Appin, the Camerons of Lochiel, the MacGregors, the MacLeans of Duart. The lights of the Campbell encampment showed three quarters of a mile below, running from the castle gate north along the shingle to the mouth of the river Lochy. The Campbell scouts up the Great Glen had reported, two days ago, that Montrose was a hundred miles to the south. Argyll himself had come up to watch the campaign close out. He was aboard his galley off the castle, with a fair anchorage and a fair wind home.

THE QUARTER HOUR BEFORE FIRST LIGHT

It is a quarter past five on the morning of the second of February, the morning of Candlemas, in heavy frost, and the question in MacColla's mind is not whether to attack but in what order to send the columns down. Argyll is on the galley. Auchinbreck has the army, three regiments along the shore, the right on the river, the centre opposite the castle gate, the left on the shingle by the loch. Auchinbreck is a careful soldier and does not yet know there is anything above him but the mountain. The wind is off the Highland backs, which means the Campbell muskets will fire into smoke that holds their own fire while the Highland line closes; the Highland muskets will speak at thirty yards into clear air. One volley each, and then the work of the targe and the sword. MacColla counts the regiments by their watch-fires and counts his own line by the dark shapes of the chiefs around him, and the arithmetic that matters to him is older than this morning's. His father's people lost Islay in 1614. His father's people have not had a winter on land of their own in thirty-one years. The senior line of Clan Donald has been a tenantry on the kindness of cousins since before he was born. Below him on the shingle stand three thousand men of the surname that took the island, drawn up in line of battle by an officer who believes he is the besieger and not the besieged. The hinge is not whether the charge will work. MacColla has done this in Ireland; he knows it will work. The hinge is the recognition that the door, having stood closed for a generation, is at this hour standing open, and that the man on the shoulder above Inverlochy with fifteen hundred MacDonalds at his back is the man whose hand is on the latch.

THE CHARGE

Montrose gave the signal at first grey light, about twenty past seven, by the account of his chaplain George Wishart. The Highland line came down off Meall an t-Suidhe in three columns at the run, in silence, with no pipes until the first volley: the right under MacColla on the shoulder, the centre under Montrose with the Irish brigade, the left under the Stewarts of Appin and the Macleans. The Campbell pickets saw them at three hundred yards in the new light and the whole shore line opened fire. The Highlanders took the volley standing, went through the smoke, fired their own at thirty yards, dropped the muskets, drew the swords, and closed. The Campbell centre, by the testimony of the prisoners afterwards, broke at the first contact and ran east along the shingle. The Campbell left ran south for the hills. Auchinbreck and the Lochaweside Campbells of the right stood, and were surrounded on the river bank within thirty minutes and cut down to the last gentleman. Auchinbreck himself, by the Gaelic tradition, was killed by MacColla under the walls of the castle.

THE GALLEY

Archibald Campbell, eighth Earl of Argyll, watched it through a glass from the deck of his galley Caledonia in the loch. He was a clever man, a clever lawyer and a clever statesman, and he understood within ten minutes what he was seeing: not a reverse but a reversal, the inversion at a single stroke of the patient instrument by which his grandfather and his father and he himself had taken in the western Highlands. He gave the order to hoist sail. The galley ran south down Loch Linnhe on a fair wind and was in Inveraray water by mid-afternoon. He left fifteen hundred of his name on the shore. The careful tally afterwards, by the parish registers of Lochaweside and Mid-Argyll, counted them by household. The MacDonalds and the Highland-Irish lost fewer than ten dead and forty wounded by Wishart's count. The Campbell line in the western Highlands, built by writ and garrison since 1493, was at noon of Candlemas the work of a hundred and fifty-two years and at two o'clock the work of two hours.

THE COUNTING AFTERWARDS

Montrose stayed in the field through 1645 and won five more pitched battles, of which Auldearn in May was the most extraordinary, before Leslie caught his remnant at Philiphaugh on the thirteenth of September. MacColla had separated in the spring; he was killed at Knocknanuss in County Cork in November 1647, fighting Inchiquin in another country's war. The Campbell recovery took two generations. Forty-seven years and ten days after Candlemas, on the thirteenth of February 1692, soldiers of the Earl of Argyll's Regiment of Foot, billeted on the hospitality of MacIain of Glencoe, who had stood beside MacColla on the shoulder of Meall an t-Suidhe, rose before dawn and killed their host in his bed and thirty-seven of his name in the snow. The Master of Stair, in the candid private letters of the autumn of 1691 to Sir Thomas Livingstone, had given his reasons; one of them was that the regiment was available, and the regiment was available because the family that raised it had a count of its own that ran back to the river bank below Inverlochy Castle.

THE CAIRN

The field at Inverlochy is now a recreation ground beside the new town of Fort William. There is a single low cairn on the river bank, in iron-grey stone on a concrete plinth, put there by the western clans in 1945 on the three-hundredth anniversary. The inscription is in Gaelic. It says, in plain translation, Here ran the Campbells. Some grievances cannot be settled by treaty or by time. They can only be marked, in the precise place, with the precise sentence, and left for a diaspora reader to find on a Tuesday afternoon in the rain. The morning of Candlemas 1645 is the morning the western MacDonalds remember when they sit down with a Campbell at a wedding. They sit down. They remember. The cairn does the rest.