It's Friday morning, 23 June 2023 and we set off for a two-hour drive from our hotel at Loch Tummel almost to Inverness to visit the battle site of Culloden. "Who was fighting?" asked someone who should have paid more attention in her History classes. "I think it was the French..." came a reply. Steve the driver was too busy driving (or laughing) to reply so I chirrupped up. "It was the Scots and the English, the French had sent a few to fight on the Scottish side and England won. It was the end of the 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie rebellion..." (a few murmers of recollection at that point) "...and it was the last big battle to be fought on English soil." (a burst of laughter at that!) "I mean British soil!" I hastily amended. Just testing you...
Sadly this is the only one of my photos of the visit as we spent most of the time looking around the excellent museum which had a surround movie showing on all four walls and a large ginger-haired Scotsman demonstrating how the Scots charged with swords and shields and just a few firearms against the massed cannon and Brown Bess muskets of the English.
This was the last battle on 16 April 1746 of the Jacobite Rebellions - Jacobite because the English had invited the Protestant William of Orange to be King William III, deposing the catholic King James II, whose name in Latin would be Jacoba. This was an event some 57 years in the past by the time of Culloden. During that time King William III had ruled together with Queen Mary II and subsequently on his own, then came Queen Anne, then George I and at time of battle King George II was on the throne. (It was early morning, after all...)
Consequently the English had had time to form a counter-action to the Scots' habit of knocking aside a musket and bayonet with their small round shields, known as targes with a backhand motion, to plunge a sword forward to kill their foe. At Culloden instead of trying to kill the enemy in front of them the English thrust their bayonets at the enemy attacking the soldier to the right.
The battlefield has been preserved almost exactly as it was in 1746, the only difference being the long grass, which would have been grazed by cattle and goats in 1746. To combat this some Shetland cattle and British primitive goats have been introduced to help return the site to a short-cropped surface. Red flags denote the English lines whilst blue ones (vaguely visible to the left and further to the left of the red flag - at least the poles are) denote the Jacobite lines which included some French regiments and Irish picquets. Charles Edward Stuart - Bonnie Prince Charlie - was behind the Jacobite line.
I've zoomed in a bit here and added pointy fingers to show the flagpoles of the Scottish line. The battle started with artillery fire at long range. The cannon fired round shot but at extreme range they were unlikely to kill or wound more than one person per shot. As the Scottish charge got closer the English turned to firing canister - literally a can filled with musket balls that, when fired, spread the balls out like a shotgun effect. This caused devastation amongst the Scottish army. The battle lasted just one hour and resulted in around 50 deaths and 200 wounded English whilst the Scots and their allies suffered 1500-2000 killed or wounded. The hunting down of men as an aftermath of the battle in an attempt to destroy the clan system earned the English commander, the Duke of Cumberland (King George II's younger son) the nickname of 'Butcher' Cumberland.
In years past, I would have loved to walk the battlefield. Sadly I'm no longer as sprightly as I used to be. Cairns mark the dead of the various clans, French batallion and English. The battlefield is a designated war grave. In recent years there have been instances of people climbing on, even picnicking on the cairns and leaving litter. If you visit, please don't be such a prat. Though I suspect few such prats read this blog...
From Culloden we go to Aviemore for lunch. This ski resort has become very fashionable but mainly only since the chair lift was installed in 1961. As such it has the aspect of a modern town despite having been occupied since the Bronze Age. There are stone circles nearby but we didn't see them. I had only pottered about the museum and then gone around the corner to take the photo of the battle site, but it was enough to tire me out for a while. So we were mainly only interested in having some lunch and ended up in a Costa just a few yards from the coach. A couple of women were seen by other passengers heading into a cafe to order a meal with only 15 minutes to go and with a 10 minute walk back to the coach. The other passengers reminded them of this fact. "Oh it won't matter," one said. Steve had to go and drag them out. I mean - who would think themselves so important that they would be willing to deliberately make 40 other people wait for them?
After Aviemore we go to the Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore. They have Highland cattle, reindeer and a collection of old buildings that have been carefully catalogued, demolished and transported here for rebuilding. (Er, that's the buildings, not the animals...) As can be imagined, there wasn't too much daylight getting into this building which required waddling with stooped head to get in and out.
A grocery shop with a tiny Post Office built onto the side as a lean-to. We indulged in a quarter of chocolate raisins from a huge collection of sweetie jars... We know how to live dangerously!
A Highland coo. The gent is Andrew who, along with his wife, occupied both the seats opposite us on the coach behind the driver and at our dining table for breakfast and evening meals. The coo acted like most horned animals do when I am anywhere in the vicinity and made for me, trying to appear nonchalant until the last moment when it reached the fencing and tried to stretch over wanting me to interact. What the heck do you do with a Highland coo anyway? Those horns could do damage and the nose was far too slobbery to stroke...
Another dark cottage, though this one did have some windows to allow a bit of light to get in. There just wasn't all that much light to get in at this point and in fact not long after this we headed for the coach as it began to rain.
We headed back to the Loch Tummel Hotel. Memories of the deranged BT Open Reach van driver of the other night were re-invoked going down the winding road, but this time it was a very heavily-laden wagon and trailer of tree trunks from the Scottish logging industry that nearly wiped us out.
Many thanks to Steve, our driver and David, the manager of the hotel and all those who made the holiday such a pleasant one. We had been the first ones on the coach on the first morning and we were the last ones to leave it once we got back home. I had gone on the microphone - yes little shy me, who would have thought... - to give a vote of thanks to Steve before we released our first fellow travellers back into the wild at Penrith. Until the next time...
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