“When Grahame reached the height at Drumclog, and saw the Whigs about half a mile to the north of that place, near to where Stabbyside House now stands, he placed his prisoners under a guard in the farmyard of North Drumclog, and, having drawn up his three troops of cavalry, he advanced to attack the Whigs. Mr. Russel says, Claverhouse gave orders to his troops to give no quarter to the Covenanters; and that ‘there was such a spirit given forth from the Lord, that both men and women who had no arms faced the troops.’ The dragoons had to march down an arable field of a very slight declivity, at the foot of which a small piece of marshy ground (provincially termed misk or boggy land) lay between the hostile parties. As many of the insurgents resided in that immediate neighbourhood, they could not fail to know that this marshy place, on the north side of which they had taken their stand, was in some places too soft to support the feet of horses. But as this swamp was covered with a sward of green herbage, and was but of a few yards in breadth, and lying between two fields of arable land, the declivity of which was on both sides towards the bog, it is evident that Grahame did not perceive it to be a marsh; and to this, above all other circumstances, is his defeat to be attributed. “This ground, so favourable to the Covenanters, appears to have been taken up more from accident than design. If it had been their wish to have taken their station in or behind a bog, they could have found many of them much nearer to where the congregation first met, and much more impenetrable to cavalry than that where the rencounter happened. In advancing from Hairlaw Hill to the place of action, they passed several deep flow-mosses, some of them of great extent, and into which cavalry could not have entered. Even when the hostile parties came in sight of each other, the Covenanters were nearer to a flow-moss than they were to the marshy ground behind which they placed themselves. Had Captain Grahame known the ground, he could have easily avoided the marsh, and passed the extremity of it by a public road, only about two or three hundred yards to the westward.