Reid Stuart. I Met the Devil and Dundee: The Battle of Killiecrankie, 1689

Newthorpe (Nottinghamshire, UK): Partizan Press, 2009. — 112 p. — ISBN: 978-1-85818-587-3.The Highland Clans have long been famed as a warrior race, charging fiercely into battle, sometimes against each other, but more often to set about a thin and uncertain line of English redcoats with their basket-hilted broadswords or two handed claymores. Yet looking for the historical truth behind the legend, it generally proves to be a curiously elusive business. All too often, instead of heavily armed fighters we find those young boys and old men standing reluctantly in line at Culloden, while their most dramatic victory was played out not on the heather, but on a flat Lothian cornfield at Prestonpans in 1745. Nevertheless, there were some battles which did fit that popular ideal a little more closely, and none more so than Killiecrankie in 1689. Nevertheless, like most episodes in history a closer look at that particular battle reveals that there was rather more to the story than might at first appear: For a start the redcoats were not English at all, but Scots and many of them Highland Scots at that, commanded by a Highland general. And if some of them ran away rather than face the avalanche of steel rolling down that undoubtedly steep hillside, many of them did not and the slaughter was far from being one sided.