jamesq | Scottish Adventurrres 9 - Saying Goodbye, Part 1

Tuesday, June 12 – Time for a spot of monster hunting on Loch Ness this morning then it is an emotional visit to tragic Culloden battlefield (Bonnie Prince Charlie’s last stand). As we head southwards we will enjoy some nice forest walks at the Hermitage and pop into a wee distillery for a taste of the good stuff! It's then a short hop to spend the next two nights in real style – in a 16th Century castle near Stirling!

F cajoled us something fierce to dive into Loch Ness. "What are you going to tell your grandchildren?" she asked, "Are you going to tell them you went all the way to Scotland and didn't take your chance at swimming with the monsters". Like a goof, I didn't get into my swim trunks. I did however have my breakaway pants, so I did manage to wade into Loch Ness. F called me on it. I told her that I was just going to lie to my grand children - it's not like they can contradict me.

Oh my dear sweet god that water was cold! Worse then that though was the stones that made up the Loch bed. They were sharp and super-difficult to walk on for any length of time - especially when your feet started going numb (believe me this made things worse). MT, JO, RX and NH made the effort probably shriveled up parts of their bodies they didn't even know they had!

Next up was Culloden. Culloden was was where the English defeated the Jacobite rebellion. It also signaled the end (until modern times) the end of Scottish culture. The clan system was dismantled after this and it was illegal to speak Gaelic (sp?). F called it Ethnic Cleansing. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do consider it a grave injustice.

The Scots take this stuff very seriously and they can hold a grudge. For example, we know where both sides of the battle buried their dead. The Scots side is considered holy ground. They made the English side into an off-leash area for dog-walkers.

Now Bonny Prince Charlie and his officers did make some really awful tactical decisions at Culloden (choosing opposite sides of a swamp instead of the top of a convenient hill as the site of a battle for example), but I don't know that history would have turned out all that differently if they were better tacticians. The English had more resources, more men and a technological advantage. Fighting better at Culloden may have meant that the memorial we saw would be farther south.

On the other hand, the Jacobites did come sufficiently close to sacking London (at one point) that the King was getting onto a boat for France, so who knows how things might have turned out.

So yeah, they fought on what was essentially a swamp. The memorial was basically a huge field. One one end were two flags marking the ends of the Jacobite lines. On the other end was the English line. When F gave us 30 minutes to wander around before returning to the Bus, I walked the long way around the battlefield to the Jacobite line. The field itself was this uneven, spongy mass of low shrubs and stagnant water. There was only a clear, paved, path half way, so I got a good taste of what it must have been like three hundred years earlier.

Having reached the Jacobite side, I decided to see how long it would take to charge the English side (which is what they did in the past). I set the timer on my watch and proceeded to do a broken-field dash across the battlefield.

It took me six minutes and twenty seconds. On a sunny day. In modern hiking shoes. Taking care not to stomp any puddles. During the real battle of Culloden, the Jacobites where all kilted out and carrying claymores. It was poring, sideways rain. So their were some big differences between my little experiment and what the real troops did.

Of course the biggest difference was that there wasn't a massed line of armed infantry trying to kill me. For over six minutes.

Everyone was quiet leaving Culloden.

Our last venue as a group was a forest Hermitage (I honestly don't know what it's name or location was, other then it was somewhere between Inverness and Stirling. Honest to god forest, rapids, waterfalls, old ruins - everything I've seen in a thousand old sword-and-sorcery movies. It was fun.

We transferred RO, RZ, LW, TD, NH and HR to another WIS van heading back to Edinburgh and the rest of us continued on. Emails were exchanged (and pretty much everyone had an email, proof positive that we are well-and-truly into the 21st century).