Just before Culloden, Barisdale was engaged in the not uncongenial duty of reducing the shires of Ross and Sutherland. In the latter county Lord Reay, with the Mackays and the Earl of Sutherland, were for King George; Lord Loudon also was quartered with his force in Ross-shire. Lord Cromarty, with the Mackenzies, Mackintoshes, Mackinnons, Macgregors, and Barisdale’s Macdonnells, did little, retiring to his own house. Barisdale was anxious to burn the house of Ross of Balnagoun, but Lochiel, who had arrived with Lord George Murray, intervened. At Dornoch, Barisdale went to church, where the Rev. Mr. Kirk, a gentleman connected with the Duke of Argyll, had the courage to pray for King George. Barisdale leaped up, swaggered, fumed, and, it is rather absurdly said, threatened to put Mr. Kirk in his famous engine of torture. The chivalrous Duke of Perth protected Mr. Kirk, saying that all brave men were his friends, and asked the clergyman to dinner.[58] Lord George Murray, finding Cromarty incompetent, and Barisdale mainly occupied in burning granaries, now took the command, and Loudon crossed the Firth into Sutherland. Perth then led the Prince’s forces across the Firth, and Loudon hastened to withdraw into central Sutherland. Neither side was anxious to come to blows. Macdonnell of Scotus, a man ‘brave, polite, obliging, of fine spirit and sound judgment,’ says the Chevalier Johnstone, had a son with Lord Loudon, and was reluctant to engage. Later, to his intense joy, he took this son a not unwilling prisoner. Meanwhile Barisdale, on March 20, captured the Castle of Dunrobin. The Earl of Sutherland fled, under cover of a fog, and escaped to an English ship. The Countess stayed at home; she was a daughter of the Earl of Wemyss by his third wife, was a young lady, of twenty-eight, and had a young nephew, Lord Elcho, with the Prince. According to the ‘Sutherland Book’ (i. 420), one of Barisdale’s officers threatened her with a dirk, and, some one jogging his elbow, she was actually scratched. To this the Countess, as we shall see, herself bears witness. But it is by no means certain that the lady, coming of a Jacobite family, was an unwilling prisoner of the Prince’s men. It was irksome to her, no doubt, to see her rooms littered with hay on which the Highlanders slept, and to observe the robbery of her plate. But the two following intercepted letters, from the Cumberland Papers, display the Countess as an adorer of Prince Charles, and Barisdale as a _preux chevalier_. _Letter from The Countess of Sutherland to the Young Pretender, written with MacDonell of Barisdale’s own Hand._ ‘March 26, 1746.