Robert Bruce had been too ill to ride for weeks. His men carried him from camp to camp on a litter through the Aberdeenshire winter, or perhaps the late spring - the chroniclers disagree on the season but not on the fact. The chief domestic enemy of his kingship, John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, was gathering an army a few miles away at Meldrum, intent on finishing the sick king while he was still down. Buchan had every reason to want Bruce dead: two years earlier, in February 1306, Bruce had murdered Buchan's cousin, the Red Comyn, at the high altar of Greyfriars in Dumfries. That killing had made Bruce king and it had made the entire Comyn family his blood enemies forever. Now in 1308, at dawn near the village of Oldmeldrum, David, Lord of Brechin came down on Bruce's outposts with the Comyn vanguard. The men who survived ran back to the king's camp shouting that the attack had begun. Bruce, by every reasonable measure too sick to fight, rose from his bed and called for his horse.
The killing in Dumfries had been bad business by any standard. John III Comyn, Lord of Badenoch - the Red Comyn - was a nephew of the deposed King John Balliol and the most powerful lord left in Scotland. Bruce met him at the Greyfriars church to discuss who should lead the resistance against Edward I of England, and the meeting ended with Comyn dying on the altar steps. Bruce had himself crowned King of Scots six weeks later. The choice was now stark: become king or hang for sacrilegious murder. But every Comyn relative and ally - and there were many, threaded through every northern earldom - became Bruce's permanent enemy. Edward I died in July 1307; his son Edward II turned inward to fight English barons. Bruce had a narrow window to settle his domestic enemies before the English came back in 1308. He moved through Galloway, up through Argyllshire, into the Great Glen, gathering and losing strength as he went.
Some sickness took Bruce hard that winter. The Earl of Ross wrote to King Edward claiming Bruce had three thousand men, but that was likely exaggeration to justify the earl's own inaction. By the time the king reached Aberdeenshire he had perhaps seven hundred. The Comyns smelled the chance and tried to take it. Buchan's archers ambushed the king's camp at Slioch and were driven off. Edward Bruce, the king's brother, moved camp to Strathbogie. Bruce was carried with the column on a litter, unable to sit a horse. The strategic logic favoured Buchan now. Aberdeenshire was Comyn country - their castles, their tenants, their levies. All Buchan had to do was wait for the king to die naturally or attack while he still couldn't fight. He chose attack.
Buchan drew up his battle line astride the Inverurie road, between Barra Hill and the marshes of the Lochter Burn. His knights and men-at-arms stood in front. Behind them, the feudal levies - the conscripted peasantry who would actually do most of the dying - were placed where they could not easily run. Buchan had told these men one thing to keep them in the line: King Robert was too sick to fight. The king was finished. Then Bruce came over the rise, sword drawn, sitting his horse. Whatever was wrong with him, he had thrown it off long enough to ride at the head of his army. The feudal levies looked at the man they had been told was dying. They had been lied to about the only thing that mattered. The line broke before Bruce's men reached it. Buchan tried to steady his knights, failed, and joined the rout, chased as far as Fyvie. The earl fled south to England that same year and died there before the winter.
What Bruce did next made sure no Comyn would ever rise against him again. He ordered the systematic burning of every Comyn farm, house, and stronghold across Buchan. Crops went into the fire. Stockades and steadings came down. The destruction was thorough enough that it lived in local memory for fifty years afterward - bitter, specific, named - though by then Bruce had won Bannockburn, made his peace with the Pope, and become the founder-king Scotland needed him to be. The battlefield, recently added to the Inventory of Historic Battlefields in Scotland in 2011, lies on quiet farmland between Inverurie and Oldmeldrum. Tradition points to Bruce's Seat - the stone from which the king is said to have directed the fight - and to the Bruce Field, where the levies broke. The dates are disputed; the consequences are not. From this morning on Aberdeenshire belonged to Robert Bruce.
The battlefield lies at 57.34N, 2.32W, between Inverurie and Oldmeldrum on the gentle rise toward Barra Hill (193m). From altitude, look for the Don and Urie rivers converging at Inverurie about two miles south, with the long Bennachie ridge dominating the western horizon. Aberdeen International (EGPD) sits 14nm southeast. Best viewed at 2,500-4,000 ft AGL; in clear conditions you can pick out Oldmeldrum's distillery just north of the field, and the line of the modern A947 traces the old north road the Comyns held.