The Moray Firth coast was hard country to defend. Long beaches and small harbours invited landings from longships that could slip in on a tide, raid the inland settlements, and slip out again before any Scottish army could mobilise. The 9th and 10th centuries saw repeated Norse incursions along this whole shoreline, with Viking control eventually formalising in Caithness and Sutherland to the north and around Galloway to the southwest. The territory between — Moray, Buchan, Mar — remained contested. Indulf's predecessors had fought hard to hold it. The Battle of Dollar, somewhere in the southern Highlands, had ended badly for the Scots, with significant losses. The Norse raiders who landed near Findochty in 962 were riding that momentum, expecting to add the Moray coast to their string of wins.

The Bauds itself is a flat agricultural area inland from the small fishing villages of Findochty and Cullen. Whether Indulf intercepted the Norse force as it moved inland from a beach landing or marched up the coast to confront a Viking encampment, the sources do not make clear. They agree only on the outcome. The Scots fought and won. The Norse were defeated decisively enough that the chronicles describe the collapse of Norse control in Scotland as following from this battle — an overstatement, but evidence of how significant the contemporary perception was. Indulf himself was killed. His son Cuilen succeeded him, but the Scottish throne in the 10th century moved as much by elimination as by inheritance, and the kingdom faced more battles in the years that followed.

What physical evidence survives is patchy. A 1897 antiquarian report by W. Cramond — Notes on Tumuli in Cullen District; and Notice of the Discovery of Two Urns at Foulford, near Cullen — describes burial mounds and pottery in the area that may date to this period. Tumuli on Scottish coastal sites are notoriously difficult to date precisely, and the urns at Foulford could be from any of several centuries either side of the 10th. What the survey confirms is that the Bauds and its surroundings were a layered landscape, with prehistoric and early medieval burial practices visible in the same low hills where Indulf's army fought. Battlefields in early medieval Scotland left few permanent markers. The land was farmed soon after the burials, and the burials themselves often went unmarked beyond a low mound.

George Bruce's Harbottle's Dictionary of Battles places Bauds among the turning points of the Norse era in Scotland. The chronicle tradition — visible in W. F. Skene's Celtic Scotland — treats it as the moment when the Norse advance through the central north was broken. The reality was almost certainly more complicated. Norse settlement continued in Caithness and the Isles for centuries; Norse raids continued to land on the east coast. But Bauds did stop a particular campaign, and it kept Moray under Scottish kings rather than Norse jarls. The cost was high. Killing a king was no small matter in 10th-century Scotland, where the relationship between throne and battlefield was direct. Indulf died for the win. The country he died for kept its shape, and that shape is still recognisable on the modern map of Scotland.