Dun Neachdain
In 695 AD a battle was fought in Scotland. I can be more specific. It was in Scotland above the River Tay. We know that because one of the forces involved, the defeated one, is thought to have landed at or somewhere near what we now know as Dundee and the other, the victors, came from again somewhere but to the west or the north. In fact it was the battle that probably made possible the survival, indeed one time dominance of the Gaelic language above that same line, although no Gaels are known actually to have taken part.
Dundee seems to have possibly had two previous names, the obvious Duntay and Alectum or Alictum. In some Gaelic sources, indeed, the city was called An Athaileag, Alec’s or Alex's Ford, so there may even be some continuity there. But what it was called in 695 AD is anybody’s guess, as is precisely who lived there. However, as is the case with others it may well have been a joint settlement as it appears to be for example in northern-westernmost Sutherland with Norse Durness and Gaelic Balnakeil abutting one another, it may well have been a cluster of settlements by people as neighbours of at least two ethnicities, perhaps more, as even today’s place names might imply. There are “bals” and “pits” in the immediate vicinity, which might suggest at some time or other two Celtic sources, Gaels and Picts, and “hills”, “downs” and a “law”, Dundee Law itself, suggesting perhaps three more Germanic ones. There is even a “march”, a border, westish of today’s city and certainly there was then enough of a welcome expected from at least one of them, one of the ethnic groups, to make it the place where ships conveying an army raised and led by Anglian Ecgfrith could with some comfort land one hundred miles north of Bamburgh, his Northern capital and two hundred and forty north of York, by then his main Northumbrian seat of power but interestingly no further north still.
It had been Ecgfrith, who in 671 AD, so fourteen years earlier, who had won the decisive encounter, the Battle of the Two Rivers, thought to have taken place somewhere near Perth that had extended direct Anglian control into or further into Pictish territory beyond Fife, so to Angus and perhaps beyond. It is likely that the Angles had by then already and for some thirty years had control of the British lands to the Forth including Edinburgh and probably had in the meantime extended the same immediately across the estuary into Pictish Fife or at least its southern coast. So Two Rivers was first a consolidation of probably the whole of Fife and second expansion northwards into the Pictlands south of the Monadliath and Cairngorm mountains that had resulted in the deposing seemingly by simple force majeur of Pictish king, Drest VI, and his replacement with, indeed the insertion of Bridei III, who on the face of it was not obviously Pictish at all. His father had been Beli king of the British kingdom of Alt Clut, based on Dumbarton, and his mother an Angle and probably Ecgfrith’s great-aunt. It meant Bridei and Ecgfrith were cousins, Anglic cousins, with the former trusted by the latter at least initially.
Yet within not quite a decade and a half Bridei had clearly decided that he could go his own way. From his base above the Monadliaths and Cairngorms in Fortriu, thought now to be today’s Moray based at Craig Phadrig, i.e. the precursor of modern Inverness, in 680/1 he had successfully campaigned southwards against a perceived but non-specific threat from Dunottar by Stonehaven, then north against the Orkney Islands in 682 and finally in 683 south and westwards against the Dalridian Scots, the Gaels. Thus by 685 Bridei might have found himself in the position of a next move, if there was to be one, being to try to retake territory once held by his one real Pictish connection, his grandfather Nechtan, Pictish king from 595 to 616 which had included Fife and the lands to the south and east of those same Cairngorms. In other words Bridei coveted the very lands that his cousin had taken comparatively recently yet which that same cousin felt comfortable enough now to use as his bridgehead, in what again the same cousin might have thought to be little more than an exercise in inter-familial fly-swatting.
On landing Ecgrith perhaps drew on what additional fighting men he could summon from the Germanic people, perhaps peoples, who appear to have inserted themselves amongst the Picts of Angus, Kincardineshire and perhaps even Aberdeenshire, and advanced northwards. And on 20th May 685 he met a Bridein force at what is called in Scots Gaelic, Blàr Dhùn Neachdain, the Place/Battleground of Neachdain’s Fort, Blar, corrupted in English to Blair as in Tony, in Irish Gaelic simply Dun Nechtain or Nechtain’s Fort, in Welsh, Old and New, as Gueith Linn Garan and Gwaith Llyn Garan respectively, the Engagement of Heron or Crane Lake and in Old English Nechtansmere, Nechtain’s Lake, be it large, medium or small. The different names are both confusing and enlightening. A “Blar” is in Gaeldom traditionally an area of open, flat, soft, even slightly boggy ground where disputes were settled. Culloden was one. This may have been one too. There was also in Gaelic reports a stronghold, a "dun", with some connection possibly before or perhaps only after the battle as a memorial to Nechtan, be he the saint of that same name or a reasonably recently-dead relative, albeit distant, to one of foes that day and a prior Pictish king. Then there was in all the non-Gaelic reports a lake nearby with the Welsh, the Brythonic, specific enough to call it as a home to large, aquatic birds. So all in all we are looking for a flat piece of boggy ground big enough for a battle of indeterminate size with probably a lake nearby and perhaps a fort.
And contemporary accounts of the battle are also interesting. The specifically Anglian historian, Bede, writing at the time or not long after (he died in 735 AD) reports that Ecgfrith,
“was drawn into the straits of inaccessible mountains"
Whilst the Irish Annals of Tigernach describe Bridei not as the king of the Picts but again specifically as the King of Fortriu, so perhaps after all not fully of all the Picts but only of some, the northern ones.
With the battle-date known there was for some time also an accepted site of the battle itself. It was at Dunnichen, which lies some fifteen miles from Dundee, so theoretically in the right area of the country, has a Pictish stone so is of the right linguistic tradition as well as a local myth making it the as site of a battle and not one but two hill-forts. One was on Dunnichen Hill itself and the other on Dumbarrow Hill on the other side of the valley. However, the battle of local myth is also reputed to have been that of Camlann,
“A confused tradition prevails of a great battle having been fought on the East Mains of Dunnichen, between Lothus, King of the Picts, or his son Modred, and Arthur King of the Britons, in which that hero of romance was slain. Buchanan, no doubt, places the scene of that battle upon the banks of the Humber, in England. But it is probable that some battle had been fought here…..”
so, wherever fought, would have taken place one hundred and fifty years or so earlier and, whilst George Chalmers’ 1810 suggestion as the Battle of Dun Nechtain followed on one has to ask why either party would have chosen it, a lone promontory in otherwise gently rolling country as the site for their particular confrontation.
There is firstly the question of why Ecgfrith’s Angles would have chosen confrontation over forts, one of which, Dumbarrow, can be discounted by an army marching, as it would have had to be, north-east out of Dundee, as it lies five kilometres south-east of the route surely taken and which remains the Dundee road to this day, and the other, Dunnichen itself, which could have been passed by to the west with hardly a break in stride. It may have been that the Angles were foolish enough to allow themselves to be caught in a pincer by Pictish troops from both the forts but it seems unlikely with good intelligence, the lay of the land and numbers that must with sensible stepping-away have been for a regrouping rapidly available so close to albeit a forward base but a base nevertheless.
Then there is, secondly, the question of why Ecgfrith’s army would have been marching from Dundee in a north-easterly direction anyway. True they would have been on a direct line to important Brechin and beyond that infamous Dunottar and perhaps had business in one or both but then why would Bridei chose confrontation so close to Ecgfrith’s base of choice, less than a day’s march out, in a region he is unlikely to have controlled fully and was a long way from where his control was strongest, i.e. the north.
But doubts and questions are all fine and well, if no alternative site was on offer and for many years, in fact almost two hundred, that was the case. That is until Dunachton was suggested. It lies ninety miles north-west of Dunnichen and Dundee, so between twenty-five and thirty days march away from the city. This is important because it would mean a landing on the Tay at some point in the latter half of April, as Spring arrives not yet inland but favourably on the coast. Moreover, it is just forty miles south of Bridei’s northern base said to have been at Craig Phadrig by Inverness, a couple of miles south of Kincraig and six north of Kingussie in a physical location of some interest. It is at the apex of even today gradual, well-wooded southern and northerly rising ground from Kingussie and Aviemore respectively. To the west also well-wooded hills rise rapidly to from 1000ft to almost 2000ft, cut through by a series of burns that now tumble into the River Spey just to the east, as it flows into and through Loch Insch just to the north-east. But the picture today is not quite as it might have been then, especially as Spring was coming not just to the Highlands but the high, Highlands. To the south of Loch Insch are the marshes of the same name, a wetland five miles in length and a good mile wide, hemmed in on the east also by rapidly rising ground, even cliffs. It means that with an influx of water, be it from rain-fall or snow-melt, the already very wet strath below fills with water. In fact SEPA’s current flood maps show that with the right weather or seasonal conditions even today the valley would flood from Kincraig past Kingussie to today’s Newtonmore, three miles further south-west. It suggests that at the beginning of the third week of May thirteen hundred years ago without contemporary flood control measures there is every possibility that the valley below Dunachton was filled with a lake, the Gwaith Llyn Garan or Nechtansmere of ancient description, eight miles long and up to a mile wide. Given that is perhaps not coincidence that the current A9 runs to the west and above the marsh cum lake through a narrow sliver of land twixt hill and mire, as we know before did Wade’s 18th Century military road and, as quite legitimately it can probably be assumed, did tracks that predated even it, tracks that Ecgrith’s army would have used.
Dunachton’s political position is also intriguing. It lies more or less at the northern boundary of Badenoch. To the south the climbing land broadens out into fifteen miles of habitable land before that country and the traversing of it roughens from Dalwhinnie to the summit above Perthshire at Drumochter. To the north lies the largely empty land to the Slochd summit and the descent to Inverness. It is at the heart of country likely to have been intrinsically loyal to Bridei but at the southern limit of the northern, Pictish kingdom, a first point in his own heartland for Bridei to challenge Ecfrith but with the possibility of further challenges still on his terms should this first one have failed.
Furthermore, the location itself is very interesting. The Dunachton Burn flows off the hill and into Loch Insch. It does so through a steep-sided, tree-filled cut, surrounded by still more woodland with the best crossing point three-quarters of a mile upstream at the current Lodge of the same name below a ridge, on which today there is the like-named Farm. But for an army, especially a small one that would have been the case with Ecgfrith, there is problem. Once constrained in the cut and the fording of a stream probably in spate sufficient armed men hidden amongst the trees could emerge and from above reek havoc, even carnage without much in the way of hand-to-hand engagement, with for those being attacked little topographically in the way of escape. In other words at Dunachton, Dun Neachdain, Bridei held all the cards, including no possibility of rapid Anglic response or response at all. In contrast at Dunnichen he held few to none and the man was, as he was to prove then and in the future, clearly no fool.