The Battle of Largs - 1263

North of West Kilbride, and the most northerly parish in Ayrshire.
The town of Largs stands on Largs Bay, two and a half miles north of Fairlie. It is a seaport.

Since the reign of King Kenneth MacAlpin (843 - 937), the Vikings had been attacking and raiding the outer isles of Scotland.

Despite the victory of Brian Boru over the Danes in Ireland in 1014, the Scandinavian incursions into the Celtic nations took a long time to fade away. It would be nearly 270 years after the Battle of Clontarf before the Scandinavians’ final battle - the Battle of Largs.

In the year 1283 the English were just consolidating their conquest of Wales with the execution on 3 October of Dafydd, the last native Prince of Wales.

The power of Norway still dominated the North Sea and reached around the coast of Scotland into the Irish Sea, hedging the growing power of Scotland with a chain of island possessions that included the Orkneys, Shetland, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Mann.

Kintyre and the Western Isles had been acknowledged as the property of the Norwegian crown in a treaty between Edgar, King of Scots and Magnus Barefoot, King of Norway, in 1098.

When Scotland’s boy king Alexander III turned 21 in 1262, one of his first acts was to try to purchase the Hebrides from Norway. The offer was refused, but when the Earl of Ross led a bloody raid on the Norwegian-held Isle of Skye in August of that year, the Norwegian King Haakon prepared for an armed showdown with Scotland.

Haakon assembled a fleet of extimated between 100 to 200 ships, the largest armada yet seen in those waters, and was joined by Magnus, the King of Mann, along with other Scandinavian jarls and sailed into the Firth of Clyde in his great ship with its gilded dragon's head.

Ewan MacDougall was now on the Isles. Trying to remain neutral, he refused to join Haakon but surrendered the islands to him.

With his men hungry to pillage, Haakon sent part of his fleet to Bute and another 40 ships to Loch Lomond, which was reached by dragging fifty galleys across the land at Tarbet. The main fleet was sailed past Alexander’s position at Ayr and anchored off Largs.

King Alexander in the meantime was biding his time, keeping his field armies intact behind a defensive screen of castles. The opportunity he was waiting for came at last on 1 October, when the first storms of autumn forced Haakon to decide between abandoning the campaign or chancing a risky landing on the Scottish coast. Haakon chose to go for the landing. The Norwegians struggled through the storm-roiled surf on the west coast of Scotland only to be met on the beaches by a Scottish vanguard of archers and mailed knights, who commenced a running battle with the Norwegians on 2 October. (Ewan had, by this time, decided which horse to back, and attacked the remaining Norse fleet.)

The bedraggled Norwegians were in no shape to deal with a hot landing zone, but found themselves unable to put back out to sea due to the worsening weather. They were equally unable to gain a secure beachhead for themselves in the face of the growing numbers of Scots that Alexander dispatched from their inland bases as soon as he learned of the Norwegian predicament.

After some 72 hours of debilitating and almost continuous combat, the weather lifted just enough to enable the remaining Norwegians to make a hasty evacuation, leaving most of their dead and wounded on beaches lit by the burning hulks of their ships. The Battle of the Largs marked the rise of independent Scotland and the terminal decline of Norway’s North Sea hegemony and was the last Norse raid on the mainland of Scotland..

The victory was followed by the death of Haakon on return to Orkney, Norway’s cessation of the Hebrides to Scotland, and the Scottish takeover of the Orkneys and the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles. Scotland eventually gained Shetland too, as a wedding present.

In 1266 the Treaty of Perth returned the Isles and Kintyre to Scotland.

In 1912 the Battle of Largs Memorial was erected at Bowen Craig by public subscription on the traditional site of the fighting. The design was based on ancient round towers which were thought at that time to have been lookout posts against Norse raid.

For a longer commentary told from the Vikings perspective try the link below:

http://www.ayrshireroots.com/Towns/Largs/King%20Hacos.htm