Clan MacDougall

In the second week of August 1306, at the head of Strath Fillan on the western edge of Breadalbane near the small ford-and-monastery settlement of Dalrigh (the King's Field, in Gaelic Dail Righ), a party of about three hundred MacDougall and Comyn clansmen under John MacDougall of Lorn (Iain Bacach, Lame John) ambushed the small fugitive party of Robert the Bruce, the newly-crowned King of Scots, in the steep narrow pass between the Lochan na Bi and the river Fillan. Bruce was eight weeks out of his coronation at Scone, had been defeated by Aymer de Valence in the open at Methven on the nineteenth of June 1306, had been driven west across the Highland watershed with a remnant of his army, and was attempting to break through to Loch Lomond and the Lennox to take shipping for the Atlantic islands. The MacDougall ambush at Dalrigh nearly ended the Scottish king-in-the-making and the Wars of Scottish Independence in their first year. In the close hand-to-hand fighting at the head of the pass, three brothers of the MacDougall house, the sons of MacKeoch, fell on Bruce in person; he killed all three with his battle-axe; in the struggle the small chiselled Celtic brooch that fastened his plaid was torn loose and dropped on the ground, and one of the MacDougall fighters retrieved it from the heather after the battle. The brooch (a chiselled silver-and-rock-crystal Celtic ring-brooch of late twelfth-century Irish workmanship, three inches across, with eight settings of river-pearl) is held to this day at Dunollie Castle outside Oban by the chiefs of the MacDougalls of Lorn under the name the Brooch of Lorne, the most-famous single inherited artefact of the Scottish clans.

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