For nearly a century, the Highland charge was the most feared battlefield tactic in the British Isles, and arguably in all of Europe. A screaming, headlong rush of tartan-clad swordsmen, sprinting through musket fire and crashing into the enemy line with broadsword, targe, and dirk, the Highland charge broke professional armies in minutes. Commanders who had never lost a battle were routed. Veteran soldiers who had stood firm against cavalry and cannon fire turned and fled. The charge was fast, violent, and, until Culloden, almost unstoppable.
This is the story of the Highland charge: how it developed, how it was executed, the battles it won, and the one terrible day when it finally met its match.
Origins of the Highland Charge
The Highland charge did not emerge fully formed. It evolved over centuries, shaped by the particular conditions of Highland warfare, the terrain, the weapons, and the warrior culture of the clans. Its immediate predecessor was the traditional Celtic rush, a headlong, screaming assault that relied on speed, aggression, and the psychological impact of hundreds of warriors sprinting towards the enemy.
What transformed this ancient tactic into the precise, devastating assault of the Jacobite era was the integration of firearms into the sequence. By the late 17th century, Highland warriors had access to muskets and pistols, but they lacked the discipline and training for sustained volley fire. Instead, they incorporated firearms into their existing close-combat tactics, using a single devastating volley at close range to stagger the enemy, then immediately discarding their guns and closing with sword and targe. This combination of ranged shock and close-quarters violence was unique in European warfare, and it proved extraordinarily effective against the linear tactics that dominated the battlefields of the period.
The man most often credited with refining the Highland charge into its mature form is Alasdair MacColla MacDonald, a formidable warrior who fought alongside the Marquess of Montrose during the Scottish Civil Wars of the 1640s. MacColla's devastating victories at Tippermuir, Aberdeen, and Inverlochy demonstrated the full potential of the Highland charge against regular forces, and established the tactical template that would be followed for the next century.
How the Highland Charge Worked
The Highland charge was not a mindless rush. It was a carefully choreographed sequence of actions that exploited the weaknesses of contemporary military formations with surgical precision. Understanding the charge requires understanding its individual phases, each one building on the last to create an assault of overwhelming violence.
Phase One: The Formation
The clansmen would form up in their traditional battle order, each clan in its customary position, with the chief or his designated commander at the front. Formation was not random; it was dictated by centuries of precedent and fierce inter-clan rivalry. The MacDonalds traditionally claimed the right of the line, the position of greatest honour, a privilege they traced back to the Battle of Bannockburn, where Robert the Bruce had placed them on his right wing. This claim was fiercely contested by other clans, and disputes over position could threaten the cohesion of the entire army.
Within each clan regiment, the formation was typically three to six ranks deep. The front ranks were filled with the best-armed and most experienced warriors, men with broadswords, targes, and dirks. The rear ranks might include men armed with more basic weapons, Lochaber axes, farm implements, or simple clubs. The chiefs and senior clansmen fought in the front rank, leading by example in a way that the officers of regular armies rarely did.
Phase Two: The Advance
At the chief's signal, the clansmen advanced towards the enemy, a measured walk or slow jog designed to keep the formation intact. The advance was not a straight line; the clansmen moved in a loose formation that could absorb casualties. During this phase, the warriors endured incoming fire with extraordinary discipline, throwing themselves flat at the moment the enemy's muskets fired, then rising and continuing the advance while the enemy reloaded.
Phase Three: The Volley
At approximately 50 metres from the enemy line, well within musket range, close enough that even an indifferent marksman could hit a man-sized target, the clansmen would fire their own weapons in a single devastating volley. Those carrying muskets would fire first, followed by those with pistols. This concentrated fire, delivered at close range into a densely packed formation of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, could be devastating, cutting down dozens of men in a single instant and blowing gaps in the enemy line that the charging swordsmen would exploit seconds later.
Crucially, the clansmen did not attempt to reload. Reloading a musket took approximately 30 seconds for a well-drilled soldier, an eternity in the context of the Highland charge. Instead, they cast aside their firearms immediately after firing. Muskets were thrown to the ground; pistols were either discarded or thrust into the belt. From this moment, the fight belonged entirely to the edged weapons, the broadsword, the targe, and the dirk.
Phase Four: The Sprint
With their firearms discarded, the clansmen drew their broadswords and charged the final distance at a full sprint. This was the terrifying heart of the Highland charge, hundreds or thousands of armed men running at full speed towards the enemy line, roaring their clan war cries in Gaelic, their targes held high and their swords raised to strike.
The speed of this phase was critical. A fit Highlander, accustomed to moving across rough mountain terrain and hardened by a lifetime of physical labour, could cover 50 metres in approximately 7 to 8 seconds. Muskets of the era took approximately 30 seconds to reload and fire. By charging immediately after their own volley, which coincided with or immediately followed the enemy's first volley, the Highlanders closed the remaining distance before the enemy could fire a second time. This narrow window of vulnerability was the key to the entire tactic. The charge was a race: the Highlanders sprinting to close the distance before the defenders could reload, and the defenders desperately trying to get off another volley before the swords arrived.
Phase Five: Contact
The moment of contact was where the Highland charge became truly lethal. The clansmen used a specific fighting technique that turned the Highland targe into both a defensive shield and an offensive weapon. Upon reaching the enemy bayonets, the warrior would catch the bayonet point on the face of his targe, sweeping it aside with a powerful twist of the left arm. This opened the enemy soldier's unprotected right side to the broadsword, which struck in the same motion, a devastating downward cut that could sever a limb or split a skull through even a heavy military hat.
If the press of bodies prevented effective sword work, the warrior switched to his dirk, gripped in the left hand beneath the targe, using it for close-range thrusts to the belly, groin, or throat whilst the targe itself became a bludgeon, slammed into faces and bodies to create space. In the chaotic melee that followed the initial impact, the Highlanders' lifelong experience of close-quarters combat gave them a decisive advantage over soldiers trained primarily in volley fire, drill, and bayonet fighting in formation. The regular soldier was trained to fight as part of a line; once that line broke, he was an individual, and in individual combat against a Highland swordsman, he was outmatched.
Why the Charge Was So Effective
The Highland charge exploited several key weaknesses in contemporary military tactics. First, muskets were slow to reload, a well-drilled soldier could fire three rounds per minute at best, but the charge closed the distance in far less time, denying defenders the chance to fire more than one or two volleys.
Second, the charge attacked morale as much as bodies. The sight of hundreds of screaming Highlanders sprinting towards you was psychologically devastating. Once one soldier in the line broke, panic spread with terrifying speed. Entire battalions could collapse in seconds.
Third, the Highlanders were exceptionally fit. A lifetime of working mountainous terrain produced men who could sprint over broken ground faster than defenders expected. And fourth, the fighting system of sword, targe, and dirk gave the Highlander a decisive advantage in hand-to-hand combat. Once the enemy line was broken, the individual soldier, his musket too long for close combat, was hopelessly outmatched.
The Great Victories
Killiecrankie (1689)
The Battle of Killiecrankie was the Highland charge at its most devastating, and its most dramatic. On 27 July 1689, John Graham of Claverhouse ("Bonnie Dundee") led approximately 2,500 Highlanders against 3,500 government troops under General Hugh Mackay in the narrow Pass of Killiecrankie in Perthshire. The Jacobites occupied the high ground above the pass and waited with extraordinary patience, for over two hours, until the evening sun was in the enemy's eyes. At about seven o'clock, with the light blinding the government soldiers, the Highlanders charged downhill.
The government line disintegrated in minutes. Contemporary accounts suggest the entire melee, from the moment the Highlanders started running to the moment the government army broke and fled, lasted no more than three minutes. Some 2,000 government soldiers were killed or wounded, against perhaps 600 Highland casualties. It was a stunning, annihilating victory. Mackay himself, a veteran of Continental wars, later wrote that he had never seen anything like the speed and ferocity of the Highland assault, though Claverhouse himself was killed by a musket ball during the charge, robbing the Jacobite cause of its most capable military commander.
Prestonpans (1745)
At Prestonpans on 21 September 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland army, drawn from Clan Cameron, Clan Stewart, Clan MacDonald, and other Jacobite clans, swept through Sir John Cope's government forces in less than ten minutes. A local sympathiser had shown the Jacobites a path through the marshy ground that protected Cope's position, allowing them to approach unseen in the early morning mist. When the charge came, it was devastating. Cope's artillery crews fled before they could fire. His cavalry scattered without engaging. His infantry, many of whom had never seen a Highland warrior before, broke and ran at the first contact. The victory was so swift and complete that it sent shockwaves through London. For a few weeks, the British government genuinely feared that the Jacobite army might march on the capital.
Falkirk (1746)
At the Battle of Falkirk on 17 January 1746, the Highland charge once again proved decisive, but the cracks were beginning to show. The Jacobites caught General Hawley's government forces in a rainstorm on Falkirk Muir, and the rain rendered many of the government muskets useless. The Highland charge swept the left and centre of the government line, routing several experienced regiments. But the right wing, three battalions of regular infantry anchored by experienced officers, held firm, marking the first time that any part of a government formation had successfully resisted the Highland charge since Killiecrankie. It was an ominous sign of what was to come at Culloden just three months later.
Culloden: The Charge That Failed
On 16 April 1746, on a windswept moor near Inverness, the Highland charge was attempted for the last time, and for the first time, it failed completely. Everything that could go wrong for the Jacobites went wrong. The army was exhausted after a failed night march intended to surprise Cumberland's camp at Nairn. Many of the soldiers had not eaten in two days. The ground, Drummossie Moor, was flat, open, and marshy, the worst possible terrain for a Highland charge and exactly the kind of ground that favoured Cumberland's disciplined infantry and devastating artillery.
The Duke of Cumberland's army had been specifically trained to resist the charge. His infantry practised a new bayonet technique: instead of lunging at the swordsman directly in front of them (whose targe would deflect the thrust), each soldier was trained to thrust at the exposed right side of the man to his left. This simple tactical innovation, drilling soldiers to attack the gap in the targe's coverage, neutralised the shield's defensive advantage in a single stroke.
Cumberland's artillery opened fire as the Highlanders formed up, and continued to fire throughout the battle. The Jacobite guns, few in number and poorly served, could not reply effectively. The Highland right wing, Clan Fraser, the Stewarts of Appin, Clan Cameron, endured devastating grapeshot and canister fire as they struggled through the boggy ground. When they finally reached the government line, the new bayonet technique held. The charge broke. The clans broke. And with them broke the entire Jacobite cause, and, ultimately, the Highland way of life.
The aftermath was brutal. Cumberland earned the nickname "The Butcher" for the systematic killing of wounded prisoners and the destruction of Highland communities in the weeks that followed. Our Battle of Culloden Targe commemorates the extraordinary courage of those who charged across that muddy field, men who ran towards the guns knowing that the odds were against them, because that was what their honour and their loyalty demanded.
The Legacy of the Highland Charge
Though the Highland charge itself died at Culloden, its spirit lived on in the Highland regiments of the British Army. The ferocious bayonet charges of the Black Watch, the Seaforth Highlanders, and the Cameron Highlanders at battles from Waterloo to El Alamein to the Falklands were direct descendants of the Highland charge, different in weapons and formation, but identical in spirit. The same aggression, the same willingness to close with the enemy at the point of the bayonet, the same terrifying war cry, these were the Highland charge reborn in a new era.
For the full context of Highland military history, see our pillar guide on Highland weapons and warfare. To learn about the shield that made the charge possible, explore the history of the Highland targe. And to see the craftsmanship that went into creating these shields, read about how a Highland targe was made.
Conclusion
The Highland charge was more than a military tactic. It was an expression of everything the Highland warrior stood for, courage, loyalty, and an absolute refusal to be intimidated by superior numbers, superior firepower, or the judgement of history. For the clansmen who surged forward at Killiecrankie, Prestonpans, and Culloden, the charge was not simply a way of fighting. It was a way of declaring who they were, men who would rather die on their feet with a sword in their hand than live on their knees.
That declaration echoes still, in the targes that survive in museums and collections, in the battlefields that can be visited across Scotland, in the Highland regiments that still serve with distinction, and in the spirit of a people who, generation after generation, have never learned to be afraid.