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It is not part of our purpose to treat generally of the feudal and largely Norman families, which gradually asserted their power over the Picts in the north, and were accepted as Chiefs, such as were the Umphraville Earls of Angus, the Roses of Kilravock, the Chisholms of Strath Farrer, the Bissets and Fresels or Frasers of Beauly, the Grants of Moray and Inverness, and the Comyns of Badenoch; for none of these held land north of the Oykel.
Like Cæsar's Gaul, Cat was "divided into three parts"; first, Ness, which was co-extensive with the modern county of Caithness, a treeless land, excellent in crops and highly cultivated in the north-east, but elsewhere mainly made up of peat mosses, flagstones and flatness, save in its western and south-western borderland of hills; secondly, to the west of Ness, Strathnavern, a land of dales and hills, and, especially in its western parts, of peaks; and, thirdly, to the south of Strathnavern, Sudrland, or the Southland, a riviera of pastoral links and fertile ploughland, sheltered on the north by its own forests and hills, and sloping, throughout its whole length from the Oykel to the Ord of Caithness, towards the Breithisjorthr, Broadfjord, or Moray Firth, its southern sea.
Everywhere else Cat was bounded by the open sea, of which the Norse soon became masters, namely on the west by the Minch, on the north by the North Atlantic and Pentland Firth, and on the east and south by the North Sea; and the great valley of the Oykel and the Dornoch Firth made Cat almost into an island.
It was on April 27 that Montrose's last battle was fought at Carbisdale, near the Kyle, where the rivers Shin and Oykel reach the sea. The earl of Sutherland secured the passes of the hills, while colonel Strachan and a large body of cavalry approached from the south.
On the mainland, no new earldom north of the Oykel was conferred on anyone for a further period of thirty years.
But William collected an army, and, after defeating Harold's son Thorfinn near Inverness, crossed the Oykel, entered Sutherland, subdued it and Caithness, and pursued Harold up to his castle at Thurso, and destroyed it in his sight. Harold then submitted, and promised to surrender his son and heir, Thorfinn, as a hostage, with others of his friends to be delivered to the king at Nairn.
This new jarl, the second founder of the line of Orkney jarls, conquered Caithness and Sutherland as far south as Ekkjals-bakki, which is believed by some to be in Moray, and by others, with more truth, to be the ranges of hills in Sutherland and Ross lying to the north and to the south of the River Oykel and its estuary, the Dornoch Firth; and the second part of the name still happens to survive in the place-name of Backies in Dunrobin Glen and elsewhere in Cat where the Norse settled.
Of this third line of De Moravias or Morays, two distinct branches settled north of the Oykel. First, we have Hugo Freskyn, son, it is said, but, as we shall see, really grandson, of the original Freskyn and son of Freskyn's elder or eldest son William.
He openly asks for ships and sails in them, and thus is expected to land on the coast. But after a purposely devious course, which has puzzled inquirers into the locality of Ekkjals-bakki, he came overland by Oykel and Lairg and Strathnaver or Strathskinsdale, whence he was not looked for. Thorbiorn Klerk next has his revenges.
Immediately to the south of Cat lay the great province of Moray including Ross, and, in the extreme west, a part of north Argyll; and the boundary between Cat and Ross was approximately the tidal River Oykel, called by the Norse Ekkjal, the northern and perhaps also the southern bank of which probably formed the ranges of hills known in the time of the earliest Norse jarls as Ekkjals-bakki.
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