coveted the chiefship. Iain Lom appealed to MacDonnell of Glen Garry to administer justice but achieved nothing. He then had to go into exile and appealed to Sir James MacDonald of Sleat to avenge the murder. This finally happened in 1665. The guilty party were surprised and killed at a house near Inverlair. Iain Lom is said to have decapitated the bodies with the dirk used in the murders. He took these grisly trophies to show to Glen Garry, as reproof for his earlier failure to do his duty. On his way he stopped at Loch Oich side and washed the heads at Tobar nan Ceann (The Well of the Heads) where a monument was later erected. He told the story in Murt na Ceapaich (The Keppoch murders) The Bard is also believed to have been present at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689 when he would have been in his mid-sixties. Two poems about the battle are attributed to him although it has been suggested that one of these may have been written by his son. Cath Raon Ruairidh, the Gaelic name for Killiecrankie, is sited as evidence that Dundee was shot just below his breast plate, and not, as later suggested by Professor Terry, in his left eye. Iain Lom dismissed William of Orange as "a borrowed king" and condemned Mary for her disloyalty to her father. The Massacre of Glen Coe was roundly condemned in Murt Ghlinne Comhann. Iain Lom's suggested punishment for the murder of his MacDonald kinsfolk was that the Campbell land in its entirety should be transferred to Clan Donald. Oran an Aghaidh an Aonaidh (A Song Against the Union) in which he condemned the Scottish aristocracy who had accepted union with England in 1707 is regarded as the last work that can be attributed to him and it is assumed that his death must have been soon afterwards. Work Iain Lom is representative of a switch from the ancient, classical tradition of Gaelic poetry to the vernacular poetry of the 17th century and later. Classical bards wrote mainly praise poems to their clan chiefs in the classical Gaelic that Scotland had once shared with Ireland. While Iain Lom's work has many features of the classical tradition he largely wrote in the everyday Gaelic of his time. A thoroughly political poet, he was a fierce opponent of the English Puritans and the Scottish Covenanters.