Higher up the river, in its great bend to the south, another flat bears the suggestive name of “Bloody Inches”; and the Perth Inches too have been arena for many a fray. The chief martial memory of the South Inch is as site of Cromwell’s citadel, in the construction of which were used the walls of the Greyfriars, with hundreds of its tombstones, besides other monuments of the city. The North Inch is best known to fame for the battle of the Clans in 1396, when threescore Highlandmen let out most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.
There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this battle; a record is extant of making the lists for it, the number of combatants being expressly stated as sixty. But, among the pregnant confusion of Highland names, it is not easy to be sure who those champions were. We used to be taught from _Tales of a Grandfather_ that they represented hostile confederacies called the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan, the latter perhaps wild cats of the mountains, the former by no means to be identified with the Mackays of the north. But the Kay and the Chattan names appear to cover one another, while the other party seems better distinguished as the Clan Quhele, in whom some see the Camerons and a hint of Loch_iel_, others the Macdougals, their name thus transformed by a _tour de force_ of etymology, while also it has been conjectured that this mysterious clan did not survive its defeat, scattered and absorbed into luckier kindreds.
A writer, wearing both the names of Shaw and Macintosh, who has given piously profound study to
[Illustration: PERTH FROM THE SLOPES OF KINNOULL HILL]
the subject, concludes that those adversaries were the sons of an Adam and a Dougal, clans known to have fought against each other in the wars of Bruce, which as likely as not means an old tribal feud. Adam, it seems, in this wet climate, is quite capable of being weathered down into Ay, Hay, or Kay. The name Dougal sounds in Gaelic something like _Gooil_, or _Hooil_, which Lowland writers might make a shot at as _Quhele_, _Quhevil_, _Queill_, _Chewill_, and other forms in which it appears. Their rivals in certain books are called _Clachinyha_, which Dr. R. C. Maclagan claims as the origin of his own name, and to illustrate the contention, presents some forty spellings of Maclagan varied through four centuries, also nearly a dozen used by the same family in the records of one generation. Not only at home, indeed, are Scottish names apt to be transmogrified. Belize, in Honduras, is said to be a corruption of Wallace, the pirate, not the patriot; and there is a story that a Macdougal, shipwrecked of old on the Barbary coast, so much impressed himself on the natives as a _santon_ that his tomb stood mumbling godfather to the port of Mogador.