The Carmichaels Abroad: May 21: Culloden Moor, Clava Cairns, Killcairnie

A cottage on Culloden Moor, there since before the battle.

Today we traveled from Inverness to Selkirk, and are sleeping tonight in the Tweed River Valley. We saw Culloden Moor, Clava Cairns, and a lot of beautiful Scottish Countryside.

Today we saw Culloden Moor, site of the last battle to be fought on English soil. I already knew that this put an end to the Jacobite Revolution, and that the casualties (1500 in 3 minutes) and the afterrmath of the battle were horrific, but I learned a lot more. There is an excellent museum, and Alanna and I took part in a guided tour of the battlefield. I volunteered to explain why they were called Jabobite, and told some people who asked that I knew the answer because I am a history teacher. The real reason is that I’ve read the Diana Gabaldon Outlander books.

The moor is very large, and yet the front lines of the government forces (red flags) and the Jacobite forces (blue flags) were surprisingly close together. The Jacobite forces were outnumbered, underfed, and exhausted due to an ill-advised attempt to march down to the “English” camps and surprise them in the night. They ended up strung along and were not going to make it before daylight, so turned back. The result was that they had not slept or eaten when the well0fed government forces arrived on the moor. Prince Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie) decided to attack anyway.

There is a cairn that shows where the rebel forces are buried. in the early nineteenth century, clan markers were put up to show where the different clans were buried, but these are for effect only.

For one thing, in the nineteenth century, clan tartans denoting families had not yet come into use, so there would have been no easy way to identify the 1500 rebel soldiers on the field. The second factor was the fact that the government army forces the people of Inverness to bury the dead four days after the battle. they would have wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

Even more problematic is the sign that indicates the English burial. Not only is it in the wrong place – archeologists have found a grave site about 50 feet away, but it is unlikely that the sides divided up neatly. This was really a civil war, with highlanders, lowland Scots, and English fighting on both sides. It became an “English versus Highlanders” war over a hundred years later, when they wanted to discount the idea of Highlander versus Highlander.

Nearby was Clava Cairns, which is a prehistoric burial site. It was built 4000 years ago, reused 3000 years ago, and has a Pictish burial. It is really unusual in that they were originally covered, but have an opening that would have to be crawled through, but which would have allowed light to reach the back on the winter solstice.

The Victorians got this wrong, and thought that it was a druidic site, so they diverted the road, moving standing stones, put a wall around it, using rocks from the cairns themselves, and planted a “sacred grove” of trees that disrupted the burial sites. We kind of liked the disruptive trees.

The interfering trees.

A standing stone from the ring around the cairn.

Back in the car, we made the scenic drive down to the border country. It was lovely to watch the landscape change from heather covered mountains to treed hills, and finally to lush river valleys.