A cat's skin might be had this day for a coin. That was the message Donald Cameron, known as Taillear Dubh na Tuaighe, the Black Tailor of the Axe, brought home from the field at Bun Garbhain in 1570. He was speaking in Gaelic to a Mackintosh woman who had married into Clan Cameron and whose infant son was now their chief. The cat was Clan Mackintosh's symbol. He was telling her that her own clan had been wiped out and that she was hearing it from the man who had killed her chief with a Lochaber axe. She tried to murder her baby. The Black Tailor stopped her in time. She was banished from Lochaber forever.
The fight at Bun Garbhain happened because a Cameron chief had died too soon. Donald Dubh Cameron, fifteenth Chief of Clan Cameron, left an infant son, Allan, as his heir. An infant could not lead. The clan split between its two main branches, the Lochiels and the Erracht, with Cameron of Erracht claiming the chiefship for himself. Worse, the infant's mother was a Mackintosh, and Clan Mackintosh and Clan Cameron had hated each other for generations. The Mackintosh chief saw the moment. With two hundred men he rode into Cameron lands near Loch Arkaig and forced a battle. The Camerons, though outnumbered, knew the country. They took the high ground above the loch and the Mackintoshes began to die.
The Mackintosh chief pulled his men back around the head of Loch Eil to the Ardgour shore and rallied. The Camerons pursued. A second engagement broke out with similar results: many dead Mackintoshes, the Camerons pressing forward. Somewhere in that second action, Donald 'Taillear Dubh na Tuaighe' Cameron, son of the fourteenth chief, killed the Mackintosh chief with a Lochaber axe, the long-hafted bladed polearm that gave its name to a whole region. His followers carried their fallen leader back to a place called Bun Garbhain, or Bun Garvan, and made camp in a small hollow named Cuil nan Cuileag. A third clash had been inconclusive. They thought the night would hold. They were wrong. The Camerons came in the dark and killed every Mackintosh in the hollow.
When the killing was over the Black Tailor went to find Allan's mother. She was a Mackintosh by birth, married into the Cameron family, and the people he had just killed in their sleep were her relatives. He told her what had happened in a Gaelic line that combined boast and offer of trade: gun robh bian cait au diugh air plang, agus rogha's taghadh air peighinn. A cat's skin might be had this day for a plack and the best of them for a penny. The cat was the Mackintosh emblem. She understood. She picked up her infant son, the next chief of the people who had just destroyed her own, and tried to kill him. The Black Tailor reached her in time. Allan Cameron survived to grow up and lead the clan. His mother was banished from Lochaber and never returned.
The fight wandered across some of the most striking water-cut country in the Highlands. Loch Arkaig stretches west-northwest for twelve miles between high ridges, ending in country still difficult to reach by road. Loch Eil opens out toward Loch Linnhe and the sea. The Ardgour shore rises sharply from the water. The names along the route, Bun Garbhain, Cuil nan Cuileag, are mostly Gaelic descriptions of small features: the foot of the rough place, the corner of the flies. They do not mark anything on a modern Ordnance Survey map with monuments or signposts. The country that held the killing keeps its own counsel. The story survived in clan tradition, in a single line of Gaelic poetry, and in the family histories of the Camerons of Lochiel, who continued to lead the clan for the next four centuries.
The action sprawled from Loch Arkaig (56.97 N, 5.17 W) west around the head of Loch Eil to the Ardgour shore (about 56.85 N, 5.32 W). Recommended viewing altitude 3,000-4,500 ft AGL to see the whole sweep at once. Visual references: Loch Arkaig and Loch Eil as long parallel ribbons separated by high ground, with Ardgour rising on the south side of Loch Eil and Lochaber proper to the north. Nearest ICAO airport is Inverness (EGPE) well to the northeast; Oban (EGEO) is the regional alternate to the southwest. Watch for rapid weather changes and turbulence over the high ridges between the lochs.