Two historians, three centuries apart, looked at the same Highland battle and could not agree on who was even fighting. The Battle of Torran Dubh - also called Torran-dow or Torran Du - took place somewhere in Sutherland in 1517. Beyond that, almost everything is in dispute. The first surviving account was written a century later by a man whose father was the local earl. The second was written four centuries later, by a historian who had found a manuscript that contradicted the first. The truth, as so often in clan history, lies somewhere between the two - or has been lost entirely.
The first account comes from Sir Robert Gordon, 1st Baronet, writing in the 1610s or 1620s. Gordon was a younger son of Alexander Gordon, 12th Earl of Sutherland - the Earldom of Sutherland had passed to the Gordon family through marriage in the late 15th century - and his history of the family was a deliberate effort to glorify their record. In Gordon's telling, the Battle of Torran Dubh was a great Sutherland victory: the Earl's forces, commanded by Alexander Sutherland, defeated the Clan Mackay of Strathnaver in 1517. The battle was bloody and decisive. The Mackays were humbled. The Gordon-Sutherland power in the north was reinforced. It is the kind of story a court historian writes for the family that employs him.
Three centuries later, in the late 19th century, the historian Sir William Fraser was working through Sutherland family papers when he found something awkward. According to the surviving records, Alexander Sutherland - the man Gordon credited with leading the Earl's forces at Torran Dubh - was in prison for the entire year of 1517. He could not have been at the battle. He could not have commanded anyone there. Either Gordon had the date wrong, or the leader wrong, or the entire engagement was differently constituted than the family chronicle claimed. Fraser published the discrepancy. The Gordon version, repeated for nearly three centuries, suddenly had a hole in it.
Early in the 20th century, the historian Angus Mackay went back to original sources and offered a different account based on a manuscript he had located. In his telling, the Battle of Torran Dubh was indeed fought in 1517, and the Mackays were indeed defeated - but not by Sutherland's army. The actual victors were a coalition: the Murrays of Aberscross, the Clan Ross, and the Clan Gunn. The Sutherlands were not the principals. Mackay agreed with Fraser that Alexander Sutherland could not have been the commander, because Alexander Sutherland was in prison. The implication: Gordon either confused two battles, or deliberately rewrote a smaller engagement to credit his own family with what other clans had actually won.
What everyone agrees on is that a battle was fought, somewhere in Sutherland, in 1517, and that the Mackays of Strathnaver were on the losing side. The site is identified as Torran Dubh - the "black knoll" - somewhere in the upper reaches of Strath Fleet or Strath Brora, possibly near the present-day village of Rogart. There is no monument. No reliable casualty count. No surviving battlefield archaeology. The most important thing the battle left behind is not a stone or a song but a problem - a worked example of how Highland history is always two or three accounts braided together, each trying to claim glory or escape shame, and how the modern historian's job is to pull them apart strand by strand.
The Torran Dubh battle site is approximately located at 58.00°N, 4.18°W in upper Sutherland, somewhere in the strath country northwest of Golspie - the exact location is uncertain. From cruise altitude over Inverness (EGPE), 55 miles south, look for the broad open glens running northwest from the Dornoch Firth: Strath Fleet, Strath Brora, and the Lairg corridor. The country is sparsely populated rolling moor and small hill lochs. Lairg sits about 15 miles inland; Rogart is the small village along the railway line midway between. Best viewed at 3,000-4,500 ft AGL in clear weather; the strath patterns are most visible with low sun lighting the valley sides.