Prince Charles Edward Stuart had landed on the west coast a few weeks earlier and begun assembling a Highland army. Word reached the Governor of Fort Augustus, halfway down the Great Glen, that the Jacobites were gathering. He dispatched two companies of the Second Battalion of the Royal Scots, eighty-five men under Captain John Scott, to reinforce the garrison at Fort William at the south end of the glen. The road they marched was a military road, built by the government precisely so that troops could move quickly between forts. The Royal Scots met no opposition along Loch Lochy or the lower Spean. They reached the High Bridge, an arched stone span over the river, expecting to cross unopposed.

Major Donald MacDonald of Tirindrish had eleven men of Clan MacDonald of Keppoch and a single piper. Tactically, the position was impossible. Numerically, it was farce. So the major and his piper improvised. They used the now-vanished High Bridge Inn as cover, ducking behind walls and reappearing at different windows. They leapt and skipped across the broken ground. They stretched their plaids between one another to suggest a longer line of men. The piper played. From a distance, with the noise echoing off the gorge, the MacDonalds looked like a large body of clansmen waiting to ambush. Captain Scott halted his column. He sent a sergeant and a servant ahead to ask for terms. Both vanished into Jacobite hands. Scott ordered a retreat.

As the Royal Scots turned back the way they had come, fire opened on them from both sides of the road. Other Jacobite bands had been hurrying toward the bridge during the bluff and now closed in. Scott pressed his men along the side of Loch Lochy, intending to reach Invergarry Castle, seat of the MacDonells of Glengarry. At the east end of the loch he saw another body of Jacobites on a hill at the west end of Loch Oich, waiting to cut his line of retreat. Worse, the Glengarry MacDonells, supposedly his refuge, were coming down the opposite hillside toward him. Scott formed his men into a hollow square and kept marching. Keppoch's clansmen pursued. The Royal Scots were now completely surrounded by two MacDonald clans, exhausted by miles of forced march, and unable to break out.

MacDonald of Keppoch walked alone to Scott's hollow square and offered quarter, with the warning that any further resistance would mean all of them cut down. Scott himself was wounded. Two of his men were dead. He accepted the terms and surrendered. Donald Cameron of Lochiel arrived shortly afterward and took the prisoners back to Achnacarry, his clan seat. The Jacobites had not lost a man. Later that day, Tirindrish presented Captain Scott's captured grey gelding to Prince Charles at the raising of the royal standard at Glenfinnan, the formal beginning of the 1745 rising against the Hanoverian crown. The High Bridge that hosted the bluff was superseded in 1819 and collapsed in 1913. Its ruined arches still stand above the Spean, weathering in the rain.