Ross - History

History

Excavations of a rock shelter and shell midden at Sand, Applecross on the coast of Western Ross have shown that the coast was occupied by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

It may be doubted whether the Romans ever effected even a temporary settlement in the area of the modern county. In Roman times, and for long afterwards, the land was occupied by Picts, who, in the 6th and 7th centuries, were converted to Christianity by followers of Saint Columba. Throughout the next three centuries the natives were continually harassed by Norse raiders, of whose presence tokens have survived in several place-names (Dingwall, Tain, and others). At this time the country formed part of the great province of Moray (Latin: Moravia), which then extended as far west as the Dornoch Firth and the Oykel, and practically comprised the whole of Ross and Cromarty.

William, the 4th Earl of Ross, was present with his clan at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), and almost a century later (1412) the castle of Dingwall, the chief seat on the mainland of Donald, Lord of the Isles, was captured after the disastrous fight at Harlaw in Aberdeenshire, which Donald had provoked when his claim to the earldom was rejected. The earldom reverted to the crown in 1424, but James I soon afterwards restored it to the heiress of the line, the mother of Alexander Macdonald, 3rd Lord of the Isles, who thus became the 11th Earl. In consequence, however, of the treason of John Macdonald, 4th and last Lord of the Isles and 12th Earl of Ross, the earldom was again vested in the crown (1476). Five years later James III bestowed it on his second son, James Stewart, whom he also created Duke of Ross in 1488.

By the 16th century the whole area of the county was occupied by different clans. The Rosses held what is now Easter Ross; the Munros the small tract around Ben Wyvis, including Dingwall; the Macleods Lewis, and, in the mainland, the district between Loch Maree and Loch Torridon; the Macdonalds of Glengarry, Coigach, and the district between Strome Ferry and Kyle of Lochalsh, and the Mackenzies the remainder.

The county of Ross was constituted in 1661, and Cromarty in 1685 and 1698, both being consolidated into the present county in 1889.

Apart from occasional conflicts between rival clans, the only battles in the county were Invercarron, at the head of Dornoch Firth, when Montrose was crushed by Colonel Archibald Strachan on 27 April 1650—and the Battle of Glenshiel, when the Jacobites, under the Earl of Seaforth, aided by Spaniards, were defeated by a force under the command of General Joseph Wightman on 10 June 1719.