The 1715 was the first of the two great Jacobite risings, the one that should have worked. The Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, had a Hanoverian usurper on the throne, a Tory party freshly out of power, and a Highland nobility that had not yet been broken by Culloden. The Earl of Mar raised the standard at Braemar in September. By November the Stuart cause had control of much of Scotland north of the Forth. Sheriffmuir on 13 November should have been the rising's breakthrough; instead it became its slow collapse. On that same day Seaforth's own contingent, under John Mackenzie of Coul, lost the Siege of Inverness. The earl, marching back toward Inverness from Sheriffmuir, learned that the town had been taken by clans loyal to the Hanoverian government - 200 Sutherlands, 150 Mackays, 300 Grants, 150 Munros and 50 Forbes of Culloden were already mustered to give him battle.

What turned this from a military containment into something more personal was Alness. A month before Sheriffmuir, Seaforth had defeated a government force under Sutherland and Munro at a skirmish near the village. It was the kind of small Highland action that produced few casualties but a great deal of wounded pride. When the rising failed and the chance came to settle the account, the same Sutherland and the same Munro - Sir Robert Munro of Foulis, the Munro chief - rode straight for Seaforth's family seat at Brahan. The siege that followed was not really about taking the castle. The earl was somewhere in the hills. The garrison was small. What the besiegers wanted was the satisfaction of installing themselves in the heart of the house that had humiliated them, and of presiding over the Mackenzie tenants as they laid down their arms.

The vivid record of what happened comes from inside the castle. In April 1716, months after the rising had been defeated, Lady Mackenzie of Seaforth wrote to General Charles Cadogan, the senior government commander in Scotland, with a complaint that has the bitter politeness of a Highland aristocrat under occupation. "Yesterday Colonel Brooks came hither," she wrote, "with, I think, 400 men, besides the garrison, and Colonel Munro's Independent Company, who, I hear, are to quarter at Brahan till all the Highlanders give up their arms. It's surely hard that I, who have been so long a widow, should, without any offence given to King or Government, be the only woman in Britain so much harassed." She had been a widow for years. She had not herself rebelled. The arms, she pointed out, could just as well be delivered up at Inverness. And yet 400 government troops were quartered on her - one woman alone in a great house surrounded by soldiers.

The Highlanders did surrender their arms, as Lady Mackenzie's letter notes - she emphasises her own diligence in seeing it done, the tenants within a dozen miles having complied and the more distant ones promising to follow. The Earl of Seaforth was attainted, his titles forfeited and his estates seized by the crown. He fled abroad. He would try again in the 1719 rising, an even shorter-lived business, and be pardoned in 1726. Brahan Castle itself outlasted the 1715. The Mackenzies eventually got it back; it stood for two more centuries before being demolished in the early 1950s after it had fallen into disrepair. Now there is nothing on the site but a field and a cleared platform of stone, with the great walls and turrets that Lady Mackenzie defended with a letter long since carted away. Of all the Jacobite sieges, the Siege of Brahan was the one fought hardest by a woman with paper and ink, and the one Cadogan's troops marched through with the least to show for it.