The dispute began as a domestic matter. Sidheag, sister of Roderick MacLeod, chief of the MacLeods of Lewis, had been married to Angus Mackay. When Angus died, he left his brother Hugh - known as Black Hugh, Uistean Dow - as tutor for his two young sons. By 1406 Sidheag was at odds with Hugh, and when word of the trouble reached her brother on Lewis, Roderick decided to resolve it the way Highland chiefs typically resolved such things. He sent a war party across the mountains under his own brother, Malcolm MacLeod, with orders to raid the Reay Country, the Mackay lands that ran north toward the Caithness border. The raid succeeded; the MacLeods rounded up cattle and plunder; and then they turned for home along the only practical route west, which followed the River Oykel and the Kyle of Sutherland.

The Oykel and the Kyle of Sutherland together form one of the great east-west arteries of the northern Highlands, slicing across from Dornoch on the east coast almost to Ullapool in the west. The river was the traditional boundary between Sutherland to the north and Ross to the south, and it was the obvious road home for a column burdened with stolen cattle and goods. Hugh Mackay and his Sutherland allies caught up with them at the Tutim Burn, a tributary on the south side. He tried first to recover his property; according to the chroniclers, he wanted no battle if the cattle could simply be returned. The MacLeods refused. What followed was described as a long, furious, cruel, and doubtful fight, rather desperate than resolute, and at the end of it the MacLeod war band was dead almost to a man. Only the wounded survivor who reached Lewis carried the news home.

Hugh Mackay died two years later, and the chieftainship passed to his nephew Angus Dow - one of the sons he had been tutor to - and Angus Dow proved to be exactly the sort of leader a clan needs after a fight like this. He survived defeat by Donald, Lord of the Isles, at the Battle of Dingwall in 1411. He kept the clan together. By 1427 he was important enough that James I summoned him to a parliament in Inverness, where the king promptly arrested the assembled chiefs. At his height, the Scotichronicon credits him with 4,000 men under his command, and a nickname to match: Enneas-en-Imprissi, Angus the Absolute. He is regarded today as the ancestor of all the later Mackay chiefs. The battle at Tutim Burn, in other words, did not just end one raid. It set up the dynasty.

There is not much to see now. Cairns once marked the battlefield, piles of stones set up by survivors and successors in the way Highland dead were memorialised long before grave-slabs reached this country. The stones were carried off over the years to build dry-stone walls in the surrounding fields. A cemetery was later laid out on the hillside east of the battle site, and local legend holds that the cairns ended up in the cemetery wall itself, which is a quietly fitting reuse. The A837 road runs through the ground where the fighting took place. Drive west toward Lochinver and you cross it without noticing, the way you cross most of medieval Scotland, on tarmac laid over old violence and longer memory.