Note 1211 — Chapter XXXVI

The ground was totally unsuited to Highland tactics. “It is impossible to look on this waste, with the few green patches still marking the graves where the slain were covered up in heaps, without a feeling of compassion for the helplessness of a Highland army in such a place. It is a wide flat muir, with scarcely a curve, where the mountaineers had nothing to aid their peculiar warfare, in high or rugged ground. A better field for steady disciplined troops could not exist. They could see everywhere around, and it was impossible either to surprise them, or subject them, as at Killiecrankie or Falkirk, to a rush from the higher ground.”—Burton after Revolution, vol. ii. p. 518.