A great battle ensued near the Norse stronghold of Turfness,[11]
probably Burghead, where peat is found in abundance, though now
submerged; and the battle was fought at Standing Stane in the parish
of Duffus, three miles and a half E.S.E. of Burghead, on the 14th of
August 1040.

The Saga gives the following description of the jarl and of the
fighting:--

"Earl Thorfinn was at the head of his battle array; he had a gilded
helmet on his head, and was girt with a sword, a great spear in his
hand, and he fought with it, striking right and left.... He went
thither first where the battle of those Irish was; so hot was he with
his train, that they gave way at once before him, and never afterwards
got into good order again. Then Karl let them bring forward his banner
to meet Thorfinn; there was a hard fight, and the end of it was that
Karl laid himself out to fly, but some men say that he has fallen."

"Earl Thorfinn drove the flight before him a long way up into
Scotland, and after that he fared about far and wide over the land and
laid it under him."[12]

Then followed Thorfinn's conquests in Fife, and after relating the
failure of a Scottish force, which had surrendered, to kill him by
surprise, the Saga gives a lurid picture of his burnings of farms and
slayings of all the fighting men, "while the women and old men dragged
themselves off to the woods and wastes with weeping and wailing," and
it also tells of his journey north along Scotland to his ships.[13]
"He fared then north to Caithness, and sate there that winter, but