We all know that Vikings ravaged Scotland s shores...
but could this have been the site of the last Viking battle in Scottish history?
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In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
When Vikings attacked Iona in 795 AD it began a new era in Scotland.
You might even say it s what created Scotland. That external threat was, at least part of
the impetus that drove the Picts and the Scots together to form Alba.
On the edges of Alba, Viking raiders became settlers
in Caithness, The Hebrides and Dumfries and Galloway.
Now every time I use the word Viking as a proper noun
there s a pedant in the comment section to point out:
I think you ll find it s not a proper noun, it s a verb.
They weren t Vikings. Viking was what they did. To go a viking was the act of plundering.
Before YOU do that, type Viking into Word and see if
the spell checker makes the initial V the capital of a proper noun.
Anyway, let s pretend I m making these videos in 21st century Scotland as opposed
to 8th century... Vikingland....
OK, so there s a continuum that starts with plundering Vikings,
gradually develops into Norse Settlers and ends with Scandinavian kingdoms.
So, five hundred years after they brutally attacked the monks of Iona...,
when Alexander III and his Scots army secured the Hebrides
by mercilessly crushing Hakon IV and his men at the Battle of Largs
We wouldn t call them Vikings. In 1469, when we gained the northern Isles
because James III married Margaret of Denmark...
she wasn t a Viking Twenty-five miles down the coast is Aberdeen.
Across the North Sea is Denmark... just along the cliffs there is the
castle where Dracula was invented... and halfway between that first Viking raid
on Iona and that last Battle of Largs in 1263... bloodthirsty Vikings had
landed and made a base on a hillock just over there on the edge of the village.
Three centuries of Roman attempts to take these lands
had turned tribal groups into The Picts. Two hundred years of VIKING attempts had seen
the Picts and the Gaels become Scots. Now Sweyn Forkbeard Haraldson decided
that he had failed one too many times against the Scots...
Now he was going to take Scotland once and for all...,
So, in the summer of 1012 he sent a huge force under the leadership of the warrior hero that was
his first-born son Cnut.
He was still young but had proved himself in battle.
Leading the Scots was Malcolm II. Malcolm II s first steps as a military
leader had been a disaster. When he became King of Scots,
he led a raid south into Northumbria and met his match in Uthered.
Untold numbers of Scottish warriors ended up with heads on spikes....
But that was six years ago. Now Malcolm was more cautious.
Now the Danes had landed and made a settlement on the Hack Law,
the low hill on the edge of the modern village. Given the size of Cnut s forces Malcolm decided
not to take them head on. Instead, he harassed them
with skirmishing and intercepted food supplies to deny them sustenance.
With neither supplies or access to the harvest of the land
they would be starved back to their ships. After
a while this started to frustrate the Scots. They wanted to get in aboot them.
They wanted battle! They even threatened mutiny
if the king didn t comply. It puts you in mind of that
section of the later Declaration of Arbroath that said that we had chosen Robert the Bruce
Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the
King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at
once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours,
and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King
The same was true of Malcolm II and the Viking foe now.
Malcolm was forced into all out confrontation. It was a bloody battle.
Accounts talk of a terrible slaughter, the worst of which took place here
on what s now the golf course, but artefacts and remains show that the
fighting spread as much as four miles inland. At the end of the days fighting the two sides
disengaged and retreated to camp to lick their wounds.
The next morning when they saw the carnage of dead bodies strewn across the battlefield here,
they came to a decision.
Clerics on both sides, of what were nominally Christian nations,
pushed for a treaty. Cnut, his Norwegians and Danes
would go back to their ships and withdraw their forces from Scotland.
Malcolm would bury the dead of both sides honourably,
and this would be consecrated ground. Cruden Bay would be the last
Viking battle on Scottish soil... and that sacred ground... is now a golf course.
Cnut would go on to easier pickings..., invading and subduing England
Long before it was a golf course the dead were buried,
and a chapel was built to commemorate the treaty.
The chapel was dedicated to St. Olaf, the patron saint both of Norway and Denmark.
It was the first church here in Cruden. The place is now called Cruden Bay...
The bay of Croch Dane... slaughter of the Danes
There s nothing left of the church now... apart from one thing
As I m walking to the modern episcopal church it s worth mentioning
that I ll be doing my show Stories of Scotland in the town hall here in Cruden Bay
on 24th November. You can get tickets by clicking top right.
As always you can get dates and tickets for all my upcoming tour shows using the
link in the description below Now a visit to St James The
Less Episcopalean church in Cruden Bay takes us right back to the 11th century.
You see here in this modern church is the only part of that ancient
chapel that has survived. Rescued in Victorian times from the
last remnants of the crumbling chapel is the font that dates all the way
back to the original. Isn t that incredible?
This simple font has survived a thousand years on windswept north eastern shores.
...a memorial to the peace agreed, a tribute to the fallen warriors
of the last battle between Scots and Vikings.
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