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In 685 a check was given to the encroachment of the Saxons by the slaughter and defeat of their king Egfrid at the battle of Drumnechtan, probably Dunnichen; and the district south of the Forth was repeatedly the scene of severe battles between the Picts and the Northumbrians, the latter striving to hold, the former to regain, these fertile provinces.

WALTER SCOTT, HISTORY OF SCOTLAND, VOL. I (1830)

In front of the parish church in the village of Dunnichen, near Forfar in Angus, a commemorative cairn was erected by Letham and District Community Council in 1985. It was set up to mark the 1300th anniversary of one of the most significant battles of ‘Dark Age’ Scotland: a battle which, until recently, was referred to as ‘Nechtansmere’ but is now called the Battle of Dunnichen (as Walter Scott called it in his History of Scotland). ‘Nechtansmere’ is the name by which the battle was known from Northumbrian sources.

In 685 the ruler of Northumbria was a headstrong king named Ecgfrith. Against the advice of all his counsellors and of St Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who had a premonition of disaster, he decided on a massive cavalry attack on Pictland, under its new king, Bridei mac Bili (who also happened to be Ecgfrith’s kinsman). Ecgfrith probably marched through the Lowlands to Edinburgh, then may have crossed the Forth at Stirling and the Tay at Perth. As he advanced up Strathmore from Perth, he was diverted from his planned route by the Picts; using classic guerrilla tactics, they fell back towards territory of their own choosing rather than offering pitched battle in open country.

The earliest primary account of the Northumbrian invasion of 685 was written, forty-five years later, by the Venerable Bede:

King Ecgfrith … rashly led an army to ravage the province of the Picts. The enemy pretended to retreat, and lured the king into narrow mountain passes, where he was killed with the greater part of his forces on the 20th of May and the 15th [year] of his reign.

It was somewhere in these ‘narrow mountain passes’ that the Picts ambushed the invaders on 20 May 685 with devastating effect. It has not proved possible to identify the location with certainty. The topography in this southern, fertile part of Angus is open and rolling (the terrain is much more mountainous farther to the north-west); but Bede had never been to Scotland, and his description doubtless relied on exaggerated accounts brought back by the survivors to justify the defeat. A plausible scenario can be made for an ambush somewhere in the Dunnichen area, probably between the high ground of Dunnichen Hill (‘Dun Nechtan’) and the marshy ground known later as Dunnichen Moss (‘Nechtan’s mire’); the ‘mere’, or marshland, has now been reconstituted as a large pool by the farmer of Dunnichen Mains farm. The identification of ‘Nechtansmere’ with Dunnichen Moss is purely circumstantial, and not all scholars agree with it; but it is attractive, nonetheless.

In this scenario, the Pictish cavalry would have lured Ecgfrith into an ambush by feigning fear, until Ecgfrith found himself marching eastward past Dunnichen Hill alongside an extensive stretch of ‘mere’ at the base of the hill. At that point the trap was sprung: the main Pictish forces came swarming down from behind the top of Dunnichen Hill to attack the Northumbrian cavalry on the flank and cut off its retreat. The Northumbrians were virtually wiped out and Ecgfrith was killed.

In the churchyard of Aberlemno, some ten kilometres to the north of Dunnichen, there is a magnificent Pictish cross-slab (a fawn-coloured sandstone slab with a cross carved on it). The cross, richly decorated in high relief, is on the front of the slab; on the reverse, under two Pictish symbols, is depicted a battle-scene in three tiers. It has been called a ‘tapestry in stone’, but it is more than that: it is a brilliantly detailed despatch by a war-artist from the front line. It portrays the battle in a series of four vivid cartoon panels. The combatants are carefully distinguished: bare-headed Pictish warriors confronting (and eventually defeating) opponents who are wearing Anglo-Saxon helmets with long nose-guards and distinctive neck-collars. The Pictish cavalrymen are riding long-tailed ponies which they control with their knees and feet, leaving both hands free to wield their weapons, whereas the Northumbrians on their heavier, short-tailed (‘bang-tailed’) horses need to use one hand for the reins. The Pictish infantrymen are drawn up in ranks with a swordsman in front, defended by a warrior behind him wielding a long thrusting-spear and another armed with a throwing-spear.

The Aberlemno cross-slab seems to have been made early in the eighth century; it is tempting to interpret it as a memorial depiction of the Battle of Dunnichen itself. In the bottom right-hand corner an outsize Northumbrian (the size signifies a person of rank – perhaps Ecgfrith himself) lies dead on his side, his helmeted corpse now carrion for ravens.¹

The outcome of the battle was decisive, according to the Venerable Bede:

Henceforward the hopes and strength of the English realm began to waver and slip backwards ever lower. The Picts recovered their own lands which had been occupied by the English … Many of the English at this time were killed, enslaved or forced to flee from Pictish territory.

The battle marked the end of the Anglian/Northumbrian ascendancy in Scotland: from then on, the Northumbrians were never to be a power in the lands north of the Forth. Modern historians now claim that it was the Battle of Dunnichen which paved the way for northern Britain eventually to become the independent nation of Scotland and not just a northern extension of England. Some have even compared it to Bannockburn as ‘the most decisive battle in Scotland’s history’.

As for Bridei mac Bili, the conquering hero of Dunnichen, he died in 693 and was buried in the royal cemetery on Iona.