Clan MacDougall · 1306
Dalrigh and the Brooch of Lorne
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.
A king's fortune is not always made on the field where he won the crown. Sometimes it is unmade in a narrow pass between two waters, in the second month of his reign, by a small ambush of three hundred men he had not expected to find waiting for him there. The MacDougalls of Lorn had no quarrel with Scotland that summer. Their quarrel was with the man who had killed their kinsman.
THE COMYN BLOOD
John Comyn of Badenoch, the Red Comyn, had been Bruce's principal rival for the Scottish crown after the failure of the Wallace rising of 1297 to 1305. The two had met in the chancel of the Greyfriars Church at Dumfries on the tenth of February 1306 to discuss the question of which of them would lead the renewed Scottish resistance against Edward I. The discussion went bad in a way that has never been fully reconstructed, and Bruce struck Comyn at the high altar with the dirk he carried. His follower Sir Roger Kirkpatrick finished what he started. The Red Comyn died in the church. Bruce, with the blood of an excommunicate murder in a consecrated place on his hands, rode for Scone on the strength of the only remaining option open to him: he had himself crowned King of Scots on the twenty-fifth of March 1306 in the small ceremony at the Abbey, took the oath of fealty from a thin band of the western Highland chiefs, and committed the rest of his life to the war he had no alternative to.
John MacDougall of Lorn was John Comyn's nephew (his mother was a sister of the murdered Comyn) and a senior figure of the Comyn-and-MacDougall alliance that controlled the central Highlands and the western seaboard. He took the murder as a personal blood-feud. From March to August 1306 he assembled the alliance against Bruce in the western country, raised the MacDougall fighting men of Lorn and the MacKeoch and MacIan branches, and put out word through the Comyn family that the King of Scots was the murderer of his uncle and would be taken whenever he crossed into Lorn country.
THE FLIGHT FROM METHVEN
On the nineteenth of June 1306, in the small field outside Methven near Perth, Aymer de Valence the English commander led a night attack on Bruce's army that broke it in two hours. Bruce escaped west with about three hundred survivors and the remnants of his household guard: his brother Edward, his nephew Thomas Randolph, the Earl of Atholl, the Bishop of Glasgow, Sir Gilbert Hay, Sir Neil Campbell of Lochawe, Sir James Douglas (Black Douglas), and a small force of perhaps two hundred and fifty Highland and Lowland fighting men. He travelled west and north-west across the watershed through the central Highlands across June and July, intending to reach the safe country of his Campbell brother-in-law on Loch Awe and from there take shipping at Dunaverty on Kintyre for the Atlantic islands. The route ran necessarily through Lorn.
THE PASS AT DALRIGH
He came down through Glen Dochart in the first week of August 1306. The Tyndrum-and-Dalrigh country at the head of Strath Fillan is the narrow corridor between Loch Tay and Loch Awe, the only practicable crossing of the central Highland watershed for a small mounted party in summer. The pass at Dalrigh, between Beinn Dubhchraig to the south and Beinn Chuirn to the north, runs for about two miles along the upper Fillan in a narrow defile between the lochan and the river. John MacDougall of Lorn had set the ambush there in the first week of August on the information of the Comyn intelligence-network in the central Highlands.
The MacDougall party was approximately three hundred men, drawn from the MacDougall fighting strength of Lorn and from the MacKeoch sept under three brothers of the senior MacKeoch house. They were lying in the heather on the north slope of the pass when Bruce's small column came down the river-bank in the early afternoon. The first MacDougall volley of throwing-spears and arrows took the leading horses; the close-quarters charge followed. The Bruce party formed a defensive circle around the King and his immediate household with the swords and battle-axes drawn.
THE THREE BROTHERS
The three sons of MacKeoch came at Bruce together in the centre of the fighting. They had been told, by John MacDougall personally, that the family who took the king alive or dead would carry the credit of the day. The eldest brother attacked from the front with a Highland sword; Bruce killed him with the battle-axe across the collar-bone. The second brother attacked from the left as the eldest fell; Bruce killed him with the back-swing of the axe across the throat. The third brother, by the contemporary chronicle of John of Fordun, dropped his sword, dropped to one knee, and seized the King by the plaid at the throat with both hands, intending to hold him for the rest of the MacDougalls to come up. Bruce broke his grip with his left hand, struck him with the axe-head with his right, and killed him in the same close hand-to-hand circle as his brothers. The third brother's grip on the plaid was so strong that the pin of the King's brooch came open and the brooch came off in his hand as he fell.
The brooch lay on the trampled heather of the path in the moment after the fall. A MacDougall fighter behind the three brothers picked it up. Bruce, with the brooch gone and his plaid torn open at the throat, with the immediate-MacKeoch threat broken, called the close-circle to break out south down the river. The Bruce party fought their way out of the head of the pass through the close MacDougall pursuit across the next two hours, lost approximately a hundred men in the fighting, and escaped south to the head of Loch Lomond through the cover of the broken country. From Loch Lomond they took shipping under Sir Neil Campbell's arrangement to the Atlantic islands and finally to the small Irish-Scots community on Rathlin, where Bruce wintered out 1306 to 1307 in the small cave under the cliff that the spider tradition has placed on the wall.
THE BROOCH AT DUNOLLIE
The brooch was carried back across the Lorn passes to John MacDougall and was added to the senior chiefly inventory at the Dunollie stronghold outside what is now Oban. It has been held at Dunollie continuously by the chiefs of the MacDougalls of Lorn for the next seven hundred and nineteen years. The Brooch of Lorne (the spelling has settled into the older Lorne, though the geographical region is Lorn) is the most-famous single inherited artefact of the Scottish clans: a chiselled silver-and-rock-crystal Celtic ring-brooch of late twelfth-century Irish workmanship, three inches across, with eight settings of small Tay river-pearl around a central rock-crystal cabochon, mounted on a domed silver back-plate engraved with the interlace pattern of the late-twelfth-century Irish goldsmiths.
It survived the burning of Dunollie by Argyll's troops in 1647 (when the MacDougall chief took it out of the castle in a leather pouch under his shirt as he escaped), was held in private MacDougall hands through the chief's exile years of the late seventeenth century, and was returned formally to Dunollie at the restoration of the family estates in 1715. It is held today at Dunollie Castle by the present chief, Madam Morag MacDougall of Dunollie. The Bruce family at Broomhall in Fife, the descendants of the king he failed to take in 1306, have over the centuries asked formally for the brooch back on two recorded occasions; the MacDougalls have on both occasions declined. The pass at Dalrigh is today crossed by the West Highland Way long-distance footpath, and the small cairn beside the path at the site of the fighting marks the spot of the August 1306 ambush. The MacDougall name in modern Highland memory carries the weight of the August afternoon at the head of Strath Fillan.