We have seen that the historical facts are as follows:--A detachment of about three hundred Scots, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Ramsay and five other Scottish officers, marched safely, and without committing any acts of murder, pillage, or incendiarism, through Romsdalen and Gudbrandsdalen, as far as Kringelen, where it had opposed to it four hundred and five Bönder and peasants, under the leadership of two civil, not military, officers. Further, that one hundred and thirty-four of the Scots were taken prisoners, and were all killed the next day,[52] except eighteen, who reached Aggershuus, now the fort of Christiania,--the loss of the victorious Norwegians being only six killed and ten or twelve wounded. Such a remarkable result could certainly only have been attained under very advantageous circumstances, and as existing documents give only the barest outline of the fight at Kringelen, we can only form an hypothesis upon them. The following conjecture is deduced from an attentive study of all that is so far known or established on the subject. It must be acknowledged that four hundred Bönder, only partly or imperfectly armed, could not have been an equal match, even in the early part of the seventeenth century, for the smallest admissible number of Scots--namely, three hundred--that documentary evidence will allow us to admit, and especially if they had been well-armed, trained soldiers. Some of those Scots, those raised by Sinclair, were apparently Caithness men, whose principal occupation had no doubt been warfare.[53] Many of them were in all probability descendants of Norsemen who had conquered and held a great part of their country. They were, to say the least, as brave and as ready to defend their lives as the Bönder and peasants of Gudbrandsdal, a province which had moreover been to some extent drained of its younger and more able-bodied men for the purposes of the war of Denmark against Sweden. We have also seen that the attempts made to destroy Mönnichhofen's force of about one thousand men by a levy of one thousand five hundred peasants, mounted and on foot, supported by some soldiers and commanded by three military officers, were quite unsuccessful. What then were the exceptional circumstances that rendered possible the easy and utter defeat of the Scots at Kringelen? In traditional accounts of the affair, reproduced by almost every historian, much stress is laid on the deadly effect of the hurling down of rocks, or of what is known in Norway as a "tömmervælte," on the heads of the invaders while they were passing unsuspectingly through a ravine, pass, or defile at Kringelen. To those who have not visited the locality in question such an explanation would perhaps be quite satisfactory; for there have been instances, both in ancient and modern history, of troops being destroyed by such means in mountain passes by an enemy inferior in number and untrained in skilled warfare.