By seventeenth-century standards, the mid-1660s were stable around the Beauly Firth, according to Rev. James Fraser (1634–1709). He took inspiration from the knowledge that ‘historians sometimes entertain themselves with miraculous accidents’ and his reflections on that year convey joy, wonder, and even a suggestion of equilibrium being restored following the end of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1638–60). Any suggestion of a jubilant tone should not be overstated, however, and a deeper engagement with his work shows how the booming and dissonance of that period of civil war continued to resound and haunt the firthside space where he would live out his years. A modern reader might imagine themselves, alongside Fraser, and below Tomnahurich Hill in his nearest burgh of Inverness, daunted by the chiefs and retinue of MacKenzie and Lochiel who had gathered to settle a dispute, when, he tells us: ‘earth, water, aire, Rebounded at the sound of Bagpipes martiall Musick’. Alternatively, they might wonder what it was like to endure that day of ‘Cruel Thunder’, when there was ‘lightning 24 houres’ and ‘in our hills, the hight of Vrqhart [Urquhart] and Strathglash [Strathglass] fell such pieces of Ice, inch thick and 3 inch broad’. Equally terrifying must have been the sight of the ‘dreedfull flame’ caused by a barn fire in Culcabock, just to the south-east of the Highland capital, and which put its citizens in a ‘consternation’. Fraser also reports the ‘signall Instance and dreadfull sight, at 10 houres forenoon’ one day when Inverness's populace witnessed the horror of their trusted wooden bridge over the Ness collapsing in a flood with ‘about 200 persones, men, women, and Children upon it’. Closer to home, in his parish of Kirkhill, he informs us that the tragedies of 1664 included thirty-nine deaths, some of them children, such as ‘Isobel Fraser, Culbokie's daughter died July 13’, while thirty-five died in the year that followed, an example being ‘Alexander Fraser Ferrier died April 1’.

James Fraser conveys his participation in these enthralling, perplexing or dire local events as an energetic minister, single and in his thirtieth year. By 1665, he had cultivated a world that was, at once, familial and parochial, but also regional, national and transnational, connections that helped him survive such challenges and to interact with a world beyond.