The chronicler Sir Robert Gordon, writing more than two centuries after the fact, gives the battle its strangest detail almost in passing. Angus Dow Mackay, chief of his clan and lord of Strathnaver, fought against Donald of the Isles at Dingwall in Ross because Donald had been roughing up some of Angus's friends in the country. Angus lost. His brother Rory-Gald was killed. Angus himself was taken prisoner. And then, in the kind of medieval reversal that reads like a folk tale, Donald released him and gave him his daughter in marriage. Angus carried her home to Strathnaver, where she bore him a son named Niel-Wass - so named, Gordon explains, because the boy would later be imprisoned in the Bass Rock. The Battle of Dingwall, said to have taken place in 1411, was the prelude to a much larger fight at Harlaw that same summer. It is also one of those Scottish clan battles where the marriage that came after is better remembered than the killing that came during.
The cause was the earldom of Ross. The MacDonald Lords of the Isles - that vast sea-kingdom whose galleys controlled the Hebrides and the western seaboard - believed it was theirs by marriage. Donald MacDonald had married Mariota Leslie, heiress of Ross, and when the Scottish crown showed signs of awarding the earldom elsewhere, Donald raised the full power of the Isles. Sir Robert Gordon's account is blunt about Donald's mood: he conceived such indignation and displeasure at being deprived of the earldom that he raised all the power of the Isles and invaded and spoiled the country of Ross. Dingwall, which was the head burgh of the earldom and home to Dingwall Castle, was the obvious target. Angus Dow Mackay, whose own friends and dependents lay in Donald's path, came down to meet him.
Detail is thin. There is no surviving battle plan, no roll of casualties, only the chroniclers writing from a distance of generations. Angus Dow brought what was probably a mixed force - according to the historian Alister Farquhar Matheson, Mackays, Munros, Mackenzies and Dingwalls all joined him against Donald of Islay, Lord of the Isles. The presence of the Munros is disputed: Norman Macrae claimed the Eagle Stone at Dingwall was set up by them as they marched against Donald in 1411, but Charles Ian Fraser found no real evidence the Munros were with Angus that day - and some Munros, in fact, seem to have fought on Donald's side at the much larger battle that followed. What is agreed is that Angus was overpowered by numbers. His brother Roderick was cut down. Angus himself was taken alive.
Donald held Angus a while, then released him with a wife. The chronicler Sir Robert Gordon says it was Donald's daughter; the 19th-century historian Angus Mackay corrects him - it was Donald's sister, not daughter, that Angus actually married. Either way the alliance worked the way medieval marriages were supposed to work: it bound a defeated chief to the victor. Donald, his confidence swollen, marched on through Inverness and Murray threatening to lay waste to everything in front of him. The royal army caught him at Harlaw, near Inverurie, on 24 July 1411. The dead lay thick on both sides: MacLean and Mackintosh fell on Donald's part; on the other, Sir Alexander Ogilvy, Sir James Scrimgeour, Sir Alexander Irvine of Drum, Sir William Aberthy of Saltoun, Sir Robert Maule of Panmure, Sir Robert Davidson and many more. Harlaw is the famous battle. Dingwall is the one that set it in motion.
No battlefield is marked at Dingwall today. The flat lands around the head of the Cromarty Firth, where the Peffery runs into the Conon, are farmland now, with the town spread along their southern edge. The Eagle Stone - Clach an Tiompain - still stands on Mitchell Hill above Dingwall, a Pictish-era stone that local tradition ties to the Munros' march in 1411, even if the historians won't quite let them have it. Dingwall Castle, where the Lord of the Isles installed himself after the campaign, is now only foundations and a folly. As for Angus Dow Mackay and his MacDonald bride: their son Niel-Wass grew up to be a chief himself, was eventually shipped down to the fortress of the Bass Rock as a hostage of the Scottish king, and carried Dingwall's strangest consequence on his name for the rest of his life.
The traditional location of the battle is the flat ground around modern Dingwall at roughly 57.597°N, 4.428°W, where the Peffery valley meets the head of the Cromarty Firth. Inverness Airport (EGPE) is about 18 miles south-southeast at Dalcross. From the air the site reads as a green floor between Ben Wyvis to the northwest and the wooded ridge of the Black Isle to the east. Recommended viewing altitude 2,500-4,000 ft AGL. The Cromarty Firth opens out broad and shallow to the east; in clear weather Ben Wyvis dominates the western horizon. Watch for low cloud spilling off Ben Wyvis in winter.