The Battle of Barra (Inverurie), 1308: Bruce Breaks the Comyns

Background

After the killing of the Red Comyn (1306), Robert Bruce turned on the whole Comyn kindred — and none more than John Comyn, 3rd Earl of Buchan. This was as much a Scottish civil war as a fight against England. When the formidable Edward I died in July 1307 and his son neglected Scotland, Bruce seized the moment and marched into the Comyn north-east. But over the winter of 1307–08 he fell gravely ill — unable to walk or ride, carried by litter, his army thinned by sickness.

The battle

Buchan drew up his army astride the Inverurie road, between Barra Hill and the marshes of the Lochter Burn near Oldmeldrum. Sir David of Brechin opened with a dawn raid on Bruce’s outposts. Then came the moment the chroniclers love: Bruce had himself lifted onto his horse and, propped up on either side, rode out to lead the counter-attack in person. The Comyn levies — who had assumed the king too ill to fight — were dismayed, broke, and “scattered far and wide.” Bruce’s men pursued them some 16 miles to Fyvie.

Aftermath & significance

The Earl of Buchan fled to England and died there the same year. The victory — and the devastation that followed it, the Harrying of Buchan — ended resistance to King Robert in the north-east and broke Comyn power for good. The battlefield near Barra Hill (an Iron Age fort locally called “Comyn’s Camp”) is an officially registered battlefield.

The clans & people involved

• Clan Cumming — the Earl of Buchan, defeated.
• Robert the Bruce — who rose from his sickbed to win it.
• It began with the murder of the Red Comyn and ended in the Harrying of Buchan.

The battlefield today

The field survives, and is one of Scotland’s officially Registered Battlefields (designated 2011). Above it rises Barra Hill, an Iron Age fort locally called Comyn’s Camp — by tradition the Comyn encampment before the battle. Two stones are said to mark the day: Bruce’s Seat, a boulder reckoned to be the king’s command post (now set on the Oldmeldrum bypass roundabout), and the Grenago (“Groaning”) Stone on Oldmeldrum Golf Course. Both are tradition rather than proof, but they root the story in the ground.

Sources

• Battle of Inverurie (1308) — Wikipedia; Doric Columns (Battle of Barra). Barbour’s The Brus is the vivid narrative source — a partisan chronicle written ~70 years later.