On the 16th of April 1130, David I of Scotland was in England, sitting as a judge at the court of Henry I and attending the dedication of Canterbury Cathedral. He was a long way from home, and his enemies knew it. While he was south of the border, an army of five thousand men - so the chronicler Orderic Vitalis tells us - marched out of Moray and Ross to dethrone him. They got as far as a flat strip of land beside the River North Esk, three miles north of Brechin in Angus, before David's loyalist forces caught up with them. By the end of the day one of the two rebel leaders was dead, and the kingdom David had only briefly left was still his.
The rebellion was led by two men, both of whom believed they had better claims to the Scottish crown than David. The first was Mael Coluim mac Alaxandair, the illegitimate son of Alexander I of Scotland - David's elder brother and predecessor. The second was Oengus of Moray, called Angus, who was the grandson of King Lulach. Lulach himself had been killed in 1058 by David's father, Malcolm III "Canmore." The names carried generations of grievance. To Angus and Malcolm and the men who followed them, David's accession in 1124 was a usurpation. His long absences in England, where he held the earldom of Huntingdon and was a favoured ally of the Norman kings, only sharpened the resentment of Gaelic-speaking northern Scotland.
Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy not long after the events, gives the rebel force as five thousand warriors. The number is probably inflated - medieval chroniclers were generous with army sizes - but the rebellion was serious. It was launched at exactly the right moment to catch David out of position. He had spent most of 1130 in England. The exact composition of the loyalist army that met them is unclear; the historical record is sparse. We know that Angus and Malcolm marched south into Angus, and that they came up against royal forces near the village of Stracathro, also called the Battle of Inchbare from a local placename. The site lies beside the River North Esk, in the broad valley that opens north toward the Cairngorms.
The contemporary accounts disagree wildly on the scale of the killing. Some report as many as four thousand of the rebels dead; others suggest a much smaller engagement. The one fact everyone agrees on is that Oengus of Moray fell in the battle, leaving Malcolm to take up the banner of the lost cause alone. He escaped from the field and remained at large for four more years. In 1134 he was betrayed and brought to David, who imprisoned him at Roxburgh Castle for the rest of his life. There he died, the last serious dynastic challenger to David's house, in a cell. The death of Angus broke the political power of Moray. Within twenty years David had completed its absorption into the Scottish crown.
David I went on to become one of the most consequential of Scottish kings. He founded burghs, brought Anglo-Norman families and Cistercian monks north, reformed the church, and reshaped the country along feudal lines. The Stracathro victory was an early step in that long process. Today the battle site is unmarked farmland near the River North Esk, the broad flat ground giving way to the gentle Angus hills. A small parish church stands at Stracathro, the village from which the engagement gets its name. Strathcathro Hospital is nearby. None of it announces the rebellion that ended here. It looks, as so many medieval battlefields do, like nothing in particular - and like everything that came after.
The Stracathro battle site lies at 56.74°N, 2.65°W, about 3 nm north of Brechin in Angus, on flat ground beside the River North Esk. From 2,000-4,000 ft AGL look for the river valley running northeast from Brechin, with the hills of the Mounth rising to the north. The A90 main north-south road runs nearby. Brechin Cathedral with its distinctive 10th-century round tower is the most prominent local landmark. Nearest airports: Dundee (EGPN) 22 nm south-southwest; Leuchars (EGQL) 27 nm south; Aberdeen (EGPD) 28 nm northeast.