King Duncan I, the one Shakespeare turned into a saintly old man murdered in his sleep, had actually been killed in battle by Macbeth on 14 August 1040 near Elgin. He was a young king, an indifferent military commander, and his death in open fight was unremarkable by the standards of eleventh-century Scotland. Macbeth ruled the resulting kingdom for the next seventeen years. Duncan's son Malcolm, the future Malcolm III, took shelter with his uncle, Earl Siward of Northumbria, and grew up plotting his return. In 1054 Malcolm, backed by Siward and an English army, finally invaded Scotland. At the Battle of Dunsinane in Perthshire Macbeth was defeated, but he was not killed, and he was not yet finished. He retreated north and held on for another three years.

What happened between Dunsinane in 1054 and Lumphanan in 1057 the chronicles do not really record. Macbeth still controlled at least the northern half of his kingdom. Malcolm, presumably, was building up his forces and his support among the southern Scottish nobility. On 15 August 1057 the two armies met again, this time at a place the early sources describe simply as in a wood, on the ground that became known as Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire. Compared to the famous battles of European history this was a small affair. It seems to have mattered for one reason. Macbeth was mortally wounded on the field. He died of his injuries shortly after.

A large boulder still sits on the ground at Lumphanan, and tradition holds that this is the spot where the king fell. They call it Macbeth's Stone. It is the kind of monument every part of Britain has somewhere: a rock, a hollow, a corner of a field that the local memory has fixed on as the place where some recorded killing happened. The historical sources for the battle itself are sparse and late, mostly later medieval annals compiled by chroniclers working centuries after the fact. The stone is older than any of the accounts that interpret it. People have stood at it and looked north over the Grampian foothills for nearly a thousand years.

Macbeth's stepson Lulach, the son of his queen Gruoch by an earlier marriage, was crowned King of Scots almost immediately after Macbeth's death. He reigned eighteen weeks. On 17 March 1058 Malcolm killed him by treachery, the chronicles say, at Essie near Aberdeen, which probably means he was assassinated rather than defeated in open battle. The chroniclers nicknamed Lulach the Unfortunate, or the Simple, depending on which one you trust. With Lulach dead, Malcolm took the throne uncontested. He would become Malcolm III, called Canmore, meaning Great Head, and his marriage to the English princess Margaret, later canonised as Saint Margaret of Scotland, would mark a decisive turning of Scotland away from its old Gaelic culture toward an Anglo-Norman model. The line of Macbeth and Lulach, which had ruled with broad consent through the high Gaelic age, ended in that wood and that village.

Stand on the rising ground near modern Lumphanan today and there is nothing particularly dramatic to see. A village. Some fields. The stone, if you know to look for it. The site has not been turned into a heritage attraction in the way that, say, Culloden has, partly because no one can be entirely sure of the exact battlefield, partly because eleventh-century Scotland did not stage its battles for the convenience of later tourists. What you can see, in clear weather, is the Aberdeenshire landscape that Macbeth's kingdom ran on, rolling country edging up toward the Cairngorms. The road from Aberdeen still runs through Lumphanan on its way west toward Banchory and Deeside, much as it has done for a thousand years.