Qualla: Battle of Glen Fruin

Battle of Glen Fruin: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Late in the 18th century, the chiefs of Clan Gregor and Clan Colquhoun met at Glen Fruin and shook hands. They were standing on ground their ancestors had soaked with blood almost two centuries earlier - 7 February 1603, the day the MacGregors comprehensively defeated the Colquhouns in a battle that, by William Fraser's 19th-century reckoning, left 140 Colquhouns dead and many more wounded. The handshake was a quiet acknowledgement that the feud had cost both clans dearly, in different ways. The Colquhouns lost a generation of fighting men. The MacGregors lost their name. For 150 years after the battle, royal policy made it a punishable offence to be a MacGregor at all.

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Battle of Glen Fruin: A Feud Tended by Argyll

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The chief responsibility for keeping the Clan Gregor under control belonged to Archibald Campbell, 7th Earl of Argyll. In January 1593 he had been commissioned to enforce the peace among all MacGregors. By March 1594 he was bound under a 20,000-pound surety to keep his men in lin...

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Battle of Glen Fruin: Bloodied Shirts at Stirling

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1602 the MacGregor raids grew bolder. Colquhoun of Luss complained to King James VI of Scotland, who - despite a recent Act of Parliament forbidding the carrying of arms - granted Colquhoun and his tenants permission to carry offensive weapons. The MacGregors took the exceptio...

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Battle of Glen Fruin: The Battle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 7 February 1603, Allaster MacGregor led his division in a furious charge against Alexander Colquhoun of Luss and his men. The Colquhouns held the line for a time. Tactical disadvantage broke them - they were forced into boggy ground at the farm of Auchengaich, where they fell ...

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Battle of Glen Fruin: The Theological Students

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a story - John Parker Lawson recorded it - that a group of theological students had come to watch the battle, or perhaps were on an excursion nearby. The chief of the Colquhouns is said to have put them in a barn for safety. After the battle they fell into MacGregor hand...

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Battle of Glen Fruin: The Long Punishment

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What happened next was unprecedented in Scottish royal policy. King James VI - already on the verge of inheriting the English throne as James I - sought to make the Highlands and Islands 'answerable to God, justice and himself' and to fold them into his new Britain. One radical e...

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Battle of Glen Fruin: Earth and Memory

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In July 1967 archaeologists excavated a mound in Glen Fruin that local tradition identified as the burial place of the Colquhoun dead. They found a Bronze Age encampment instead, not 17th-century war graves. The bodies of the men who died in 1603 were buried elsewhere, in ground ...

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