Contemporary evidence for the battle from the time when the battle is said to have taken place is found in the Chamberlain Rolls from 26 April 1396 to 1 June 1397, held at Edinburgh Register House and entitled Computum Custumariorum burgi de Perth, in which a sum equal to about £14 is recorded for the timber, iron, and the erection of the "lists", the enclosure fence for the designated field of combat on the Inch (island).

[3] According to historian Alexander Mackintosh-Shaw the next historic record and first actual account of the battle,[4] is in Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland which was written by Andrew of Wyntoun (c. 1350 – c. 1425) in about 1420.

[17] At the King's insistence, David Lindsay, 1st Earl of Crawford and Dunbar, had attempted to get the two feuding clans to settle their differences amicably.

This failed, however, which led the two chiefs to put forth the notion of a trial by combat between members of the two parties, with the monarch awarding honours to the victors and a pardon to the defeated.

Barriers were erected to stop spectators encroaching on the battlefield and King Robert III took up his position on a platform from which the combat could easily be seen.

[21] As the combat was about to commence one of the Macphersons of Clan Chattan fell sick and it was proposed that their enemy should leave one man out so that the numbers on each side remained even.

[20] In Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth the following romanticized and fictional account is given:[22] The trumpets of the King sounded a charge, the bagpipes blew up their screaming and maddening notes, and the combatants, starting forward in regular order, and increasing their pace, till they came to a smart run, met together in the centre of the ground, as a furious land torrent encounters an advancing tide.

About twenty of both sides lay on the field, dead or dying; arms and legs lopped off, heads cleft to the chin, slashes deep through the shoulder to the breast, showed at once the fury of the combat, the ghastly character of the weapons used, and the fatal strength of the arms which wielded them.Most accounts concur that only eleven members of Clan Chattan (including Henry Wynd or Smith) and one of the Camerons survived the battle.