Twelve hundred on each side, the chronicler said. Hardly nine of the whole left alive. Walter Bower wrote those words in the Scotichronicon, his sweeping history of Scotland, within living memory of the men who fought here - 1429 to 1433, the exact year is uncertain - on a hill called Carn Fada at the southern end of the Kyle of Tongue, with Ben Loyal rising behind. The battle had nothing to do with England or with the Crown directly. It was a Mackay against Mackay fight, cousins against cousins, with the Earl of Sutherland's troops backing the claimants. The old chief won. The cost was almost everyone present.
The trouble began in 1428, when Thomas Neilson Mackay killed the Laird of Freswick, a man named Mowat, by pursuing him into the chapel of St Duthac at Tain - where Mowat had retreated for sanctuary - and burning the chapel to the ground. King James I declared Thomas a rebel and offered his lands as reward to whoever brought him in. Thomas's own brothers, Niel and Morgan Neilson Mackay, hunted him down with the help of Angus Murray of Clan Sutherland. Thomas was executed at Inverness. Niel and Morgan, now allied with the Earl of Sutherland and his troops, then turned their sights on the chiefship itself - held by their elderly cousin Angus Du Mackay, whose own eldest son Niel Vasse Mackay was imprisoned at the Bass Rock for his role in the earlier Battle of Harpsdale. The Earl of Sutherland promised his daughters in marriage to the conspirators if they could take the Mackay lands.
Angus Du Mackay was elderly and overwhelmed. His second son John, called John Aberach, refused to yield. Defend the country, John argued, or die doing so. The two sides met on Carn Fada with roughly twelve hundred men each, according to Bower - though chroniclers tend to round up. Angus Murray of Clan Sutherland led one army. The Mackays of Strathnaver led the other. By the end of the day Angus Murray was dead, the conspirator brothers Niel and Morgan Neilson Mackay were dead, and so was their father-in-law Murray of Culbin. According to Bower, fewer than nine men walked away alive. The old chief's faction had won. The cost was a generation of fighting men from a region that did not have many to spare in the first place.
The 17th-century historian Sir Robert Gordon - a relation of the Earl of Sutherland - claimed John Aberach fled to the Hebrides immediately after the battle in fear of the Earl. The 19th-century historian Robert Mackay called that account absurd. Why would the man who had just broken the Earl's army flee from him? Whatever the truth, John eventually settled at Lochnaver, and his descendants - the Sleaght-ean Aberach, the children of Aberach - held those lands for generations. When Niel Vasse Mackay was released from the Bass Rock in 1437, the chiefship reverted to him as Angus Du's eldest. The feud between the Mackays of Strathnaver and the Rosses of Balnagown then ran through the rest of the 15th century, fed in part by the scramble for the lands of the men killed at Drumnacoub - a scramble that ended only at the Battle of Tarbat in the 1480s. The hill itself sits quietly above the Kyle of Tongue today, unmarked. The battle that emptied it lives on mostly in Bower's calm, terrible sentence about the nine survivors.
Located at 58.43 degrees north, 4.45 degrees west - on the hill of Carn Fada at the southern end of the Kyle of Tongue. Nearest controlled airfield is Wick (EGPC) approximately 50 nautical miles east; Inverness (EGPE) is about 85 miles south-east. From the air the battle site sits in a notably dramatic landscape: the long, narrow Kyle of Tongue running north to the sea, the granite massif of Ben Loyal rising to 764 metres immediately south-west, and Ben Hope further west at 927 metres. The village of Tongue is visible at the north end of the Kyle, and Castle Varrich's ruin stands on the rock above it. North Atlantic weather is typical for Sutherland - low cloud, frequent rain showers, and rapid changes in visibility.