[2] Montrose hoped to gain recruits from the Borders, and marched south with only 500 musketeers from his Irish Catholic regiments and a small troop of horse.

Meanwhile, the Earl of Leven, who commanded the main Scottish Covenanter Army in England, had heard of the result of the Battle of Kilsyth, and sent Sir David Leslie, the Lieutenant General of Horse, back into Scotland with all the cavalry he could muster.

Leslie collected reinforcements from Covenanter garrisons in Newcastle upon Tyne and Berwick, and crossed the border on 6 September, with 5,000 horse and dragoons and 1,000 infantry.

[4] The other executed a flanking manoeuvre, probably on the south bank of the Ettrick Water although some interpretations follow a later ballad and say through hilly ground to the north.

Although the Royalist infantry's strong defensive position enabled them to repel at least two Covenanter attacks, the arrival of Leslie's flanking force ensured their defeat.

After Montrose made a brief attempt to restore the situation by charging 2,000 Covenanter dragoons with only 100 cavalry of his own, he was urged by his friends that the Royalist cause in Scotland would die without him.

Many of Montrose's Irish foot soldiers from Manus O'Cahan's regiment had been killed in the battle, but after fighting on for some time after the flight of the cavalry about 100 of them surrendered on promise of quarter.

Some Presbyterian Ministers who accompanied Leslie persuaded him that this clemency was foolish, and the prisoners and 300 camp followers (many of them women and children) were slaughtered in cold blood.

[8] The battle and the Royalist campaign of 1644-1645 in general feature in the 1937 novel And No Quarter by Irish writer Maurice Walsh, told from the perspective of two members of O'Cahan's Regiment, which served during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the mid-1640s.