The Captain of the Clan Gunn escaped the field at Leckmelm by swimming. Wounded, he reached the far shore of a nearby loch only to be captured anyway, handed over to the Earl of Caithness, and eventually released to find what remained of his scattered men. The skirmish itself was small and short - a 'sharp skirmish,' the seventeenth-century historian Sir Robert Gordon called it - but the dead lay across a stretch of Loch Broom shoreline that even today reads as wide and empty. In the autumn of 1586, the Highlands tasted again what its clans had spent generations perfecting: the politics of grudge.
The road to Leckmelm began at another fight. At the Battle of Allt Camhna, not long before, the Clan Gunn had defeated the Clan Sinclair of Caithness with help from Clan Mackay. The Earl of Caithness took the loss personally. He gathered his forces with the Sutherlands and joined them to Sir Patrick Gordon of Auchindoun, sent north by the Marquis of Huntly with what Gordon describes bluntly as 'a determinate resolution to exterminate' the Gunns. The Sutherlands, smarting from their absence at Allt Camhna, were now expected to make up for it. Worse, Hugh Mackay - the chief who had backed the Gunns the first time - withdrew his protection. And a different branch of his own clan, the Mackays of Aberach, were old enemies of the Gunns and quite willing to ride with the Sutherlands now. The Gunns, sensing what was coming, gathered what they could carry and headed west, hoping to slip across the mainland and lose themselves among the Western Isles.
They did not make it. Somewhere along the shore of Loch Broom, at a place called Leckmelm, James Mack-Rory of the MacLeods of Assynt and Niel Mack-ean-Mack-William of the Mackays of Aberach intercepted them. The chronicle is short - the kind of brevity that usually means the survivors did not want to dwell. After a sharp skirmish, Sir Robert Gordon recorded, 'the clan Gun were overthrown, and most part of their company slain.' Most. Not all. George Gunn, the Captain, made the loch and went into the water. He surfaced wounded on the other side and was captured by his pursuers. Loch Broom is a deep, cold sea loch even in summer; in autumn the swim alone would have killed a less determined man. He was passed up the chain to the Earl of Caithness, the man who had launched the campaign in the first place. For reasons that the chroniclers do not fully explain, Caithness eventually let him go.
The scattered remnants of the Gunns found their way back to their ancestral lands in Strathnaver in the north. Hugh Mackay, in a striking turn for a man who had abandoned them, then restored them to their holdings - the Highland politics of the late sixteenth century did not run on a single line. The truce held for eight years. Then, in 1594, James Sinclair of Murkle invaded the Strathy Gunns and killed some of them in revenge for his brother's death. Revenge for revenge for revenge - the long arithmetic of the feuds. Today the site at Leckmelm is a quiet stretch of road and shore on the southern side of Loch Broom, the loch lapping at the same stones George Gunn waded through wounded. The only marker that anything happened here is the name itself - a Gaelic shore-place attached to a fight that almost no one outside the genealogies of the surviving clans now remembers, and to the men who died trying to reach the islands and the men who waited on the bank to make sure they did not.
Leckmelm lies on the southern shore of Loch Broom at approximately 57.87N, 5.09W, a few miles east of Ullapool along the A835. From cruising altitude the long northwest-southeast axis of Loch Broom is unmistakable, with Ullapool at its head and Isle Martin near its mouth. Nearest airport is Inverness (EGPE), about 60 nautical miles east-southeast. Inverness is the practical air access for any visit to Wester Ross.