Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  15

  Culloden

  It was now the middle of April, and it felt like mid-spring in the Highlands. The sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky, and by early afternoon the temperature was hovering near seventy. If anyone in the Highlands actually owned a swim suit, I’m sure they would have had it on, soaking up some rays. I was sweltering when I got to the Culloden battlefield, scene of the most I pivotal clash in Scottish Highland history and arguably the bloodiest in a lengthy history stained by bloodshed.

  It has always seemed strange to me that Boswell and Johnson didn’t stop at Drummossie Moor, the site of the clash between the Jacobite army of Prince Charles and the duke of Cumberland’s troops in 1746, a mere twenty-seven years earlier. Neither man mentioned it, though it is impossible that they did not know that the site was nearby and unthinkable that they were unaware of its significance. Johnson, in fact, was receiving a pension from King George, the brother of Cumberland. So both must have ignored it on purpose, and it is worth a moment to consider why. According to Boswell, Johnson was not unsympathetic to the Jacobite cause; he certainly professed much interest on Skye when he visited with Flora Macdonald and had at least been an earlier-in-life supporter of the Jacobite cause. He had little affection for the Hanoverians currently on the throne, and some years before had actually spoken aloud of the right of the Stuarts to claim the English crown. Boswell clearly had both sympathy and sentiment for the Jacobites. Perhaps the reason neither man wanted to venture there lies in the raw passions that the Jacobite Rising still inflamed. Were Johnson to walk the moor and put his feelings into words, he surely would have provoked anger from one side or the other. Given his receipt of money from the king, he could hardly appear so ungrateful as to belittle his royal benefactor. Boswell also had a family and professional associates in Scotland and England and could scarcely afford to risk alienating them with bold declarations of his thoughts about the battlefield. So it seems likely that neither man pressed the other to go to Culloden; and at the least since Johnson didn’t go there or say anything about it, Boswell chose not to write anything himself. Discretion is the most likely and logical winner here.

  The story of what led up to the battle and the aftermath of the conflict have been told thoroughly and dramatically in several books, but because of its centrality to so much of Highland life and legend, it merits recounting here. Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in Scotland aboard a French frigate on July 25, 1745, at what is now Arsaig village on the west coast, some thirty miles west of Fort William. It took nearly a month for enough Highlanders—actually scarcely more than a thousand—to come to his support, enabling Charlie to raise his standard formally at Glenfinnian at the head of Loch Shiel (commemorated by a monument erected there in 1815) and to declare the beginning of the Stuart’s efforts to reclaim the throne of England. His ragtag army managed to secure Edinburgh, then moved south toward London where Charles expected to have the crown placed on his swelled head.

  Whatever inspiration Charles was in figure, in the flesh he must have been lacking a bit. “Charles no longer displayed any semblance of leadership, preferring to sulk, seemingly indifferent to the welfare of his men, with whom his stock plummeted. This is perhaps the real cause of failure: Charles ultimately lacked the quality of leadership necessary to retain the unquestioning loyalty of his men,” writes historian John Sadler. The army got as close to London as Derby (which is actually a lot closer to Birmingham than London), but close enough to start a panic in the capital, described by Chevalier de Johnstone, an aide-de-camp in the prince’s command:

  Our arrival at Derby was known at London on the 5 of December, and the following Monday, called by the English Black Monday, the intelligence was known throughout the whole city, which was filled with terror and consternation. Many of the inhabitants fled to the country with their most precious effects, and all of the shops were shut. People thronged to the Bank [of England] to obtain payments of its notes, and it only escaped bankruptcy by a stratagem…. They dreaded to see our army enter London in triumph in two or three days. King George ordered his yachts, in which he had embarked all his most precious effects, to remain at the Tower Quay, in readiness to sail at a moment’s warning.

  The prince wanted to press on to London, but his commanders insisted that would not work. A large English army was massing to his front; his army was weary and underfed; no additional recruits had come forward in England; and the rumors of significant French intervention, spread mostly by the prince, simply weren’t true. So the lengthy, morale-lowering retreat began back into Scotland as winter set in. Pursued by Cumberland’s army, Prince Charles’s army ended up on the bleak moor near Inverness on the evening of April 15, 1746 (almost exactly 261 years before my arrival at the battlefield). The prince, still sulking, and his advisors came up with a highly risky proposal: a night march with a tired army, a dozen miles through unfamiliar terrain in rain and sleet, to take the Redcoat encampment by surprise at dawn. It couldn’t work, and it didn’t. Some forty-five hundred men began the march, but hundreds fell out from hunger and exhaustion, and others got lost. As dawn began to break, the army was forced to concede failure, turn around, and march back to the moor whence it started. The duke’s men—some twice their number, well rested, and eager for battle—followed on their heels.

  The responsibility for the choice of ill-suited Drummossie Moor for the army is generally placed squarely on the head of the twenty-five-year-old prince, whose behavior was increasingly removed from reality and who had thoroughly alienated his officers. His field commander, Lord George Murray, thought it poor ground with all advantage to the duke; the prince believed Cumberland’s horse and artillery would find it treacherous for movement. This time the prince’s decision was followed, however reluctantly, and the Jacobite Rising would soon end with his decision.

  Thus it was a weary, wet, cold, and dispirited Highlander army that set up for a climactic battle on Drummossie Moor, some 3,800 men spread thinly without reinforcements in their rear. The English, with all the advantage of artillery and horse on the field, were ready for the slaughter when the action began at midday. It didn’t take long: from start to finish the Battle of Culloden lasted only forty minutes. Artillery shells shredded the Highlander line, negating their advantage of the “Highland Charge,” the wild rush into personal combat that had so alarmed their opponents. When the charge finally began across open field—the analogy to General George Pickett’s ill-fated charge by brave Confederate soldiers on the final, conclusive day at Gettysburg is inevitable—it was a massacre. And when the sides collided hand-to-hand, bravery succumbed to firepower and numbers.

  The dead and dying bodies of the prince’s army lay on the field; Cumberland’s men advanced, on his orders bayoneting and clubbing anyone who still breathed, earning the duke his sobriquet of “butcher” though whether the killings were justified remains in doubt. The duke estimated his army losses at some three hundred men; the number of Highlanders killed was said to be close to two thousand, though the historian Sadler says we will never know exactly because so many were missing, either having slipped away or been carried off the field. Whatever the number, it was horrendous. Prince Charles, some say in tears, made his getaway and struggled through the next year to return safely to his home in France.

  Some Scots have adopted a strong view of all this. The prince’s name generates something less than rapture in a few quarters. A man I engaged in conversation in Pitlochry said he was sick of the entire story, adding, “Charles was an ass.” The novelist and poet Ian Crichton Smith wrote a novel, The Dream, in which one of his characters professed a cold, bitter view of the Young Pretender: “He was an evil ghost who had drifted into the Highlands, like some kind of vaporous poison, with his powdered hair and his boyish rapacity for adventure, intoxicated by the new air, the mountains, the lochs, the heather, and by his selfish opportunism he had brought tragedy on the Highlands. And later he was cruel, a wife-beating drunkard, after he had destroyed the High
lands in a storm of hailstones and fire.”

  By way of contrast the romantic view of Culloden has spawned the tourist industry that revels in the cult of the Bonnie Prince and everything to do with him, including the loyalty of Jacobite supporters among the Highlanders. That romance has brought millions of dollars into Scotland, and it has been encouraged ever since the nineteenth century. Boswell and Johnson were really the first to give the tourist industry a boost; until their books were published the notion of taking a trip to the Highlands, much less of finding anything romantic or interesting about the region, was just a lunatic, impractical idea.

  The man who gave tourism its biggest shot in the arm was Sir Walter Scott, the creator of the Scottish Romantic Movement. His novels Waverly (1814) and Rob Roy (1817) and poems such as “The Lord of the Isles” (which the cynical English writer Charles Jennings says now are “unreadable unless you’re in prison or fantastically old”) spread the image of the swashbuckling Highlander (plantation owners in the American South were eager to appropriate and abuse some of these chivalric images for their own cultural reasons) and inspired generations of visitors. It was Scott who helped arrange a visit by King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, which led to a terrific photo op (or more accurately a portrait op) of the king wearing a kilt. Queen Victoria, then a mere babe at twenty-nine, followed in 1847 with her husband, Albert, both huge admirers of Scott. They took a lengthy journey to the Highlands and wrote of their beauty, to which Jennings added his own deliciously sour note: “Victoria and Albert … responded immediately to the Romantic landscape in front of them. They could afford to: minus the violence and crushing deprivations which Highlanders had to endure for centuries, and with plenty of food, drink and attendants to make things comfy, they could have fun, apart from the rain and the midges.” Victoria, incidentally, apparently under the Highland spell, recalled more fondly than might be expected of the English crown the trekking of the Young Pretender over this same ground. It’s almost laughable to imagine Victoria speaking with pleasure of the Stuart who, if he had been successful in his quest, would have ensured that Victoria would never have ascended the throne of England.

  Ah well, the Jacobite movement “had thus succeeded in popular romance where it had so signally failed in historical reality,” wrote one cleareyed historian recently. “Whether any of those who shivered in the morning showers on the cold Culloden Moor, so many years before, would have appreciated the irony has to remain questionable.” It’s also hard for me to avoid thinking of the American Civil War, where the South lost on the battlefield but won decisively in the pages of history books for decades after the fighting ended.

  There’s a magnificent new visitor center at Culloden now. It’s a mammoth, multimedia tribute to what some have called the Scots’ “glorious loser mentality.” Of course, in the American South Civil War memorials to the losers abound at such places as Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Columbia. Charles Jennings, the English author, put it a bit more harshly several years ago. The visitor centre—the scene of pilgrimages by lots of Jacobite-remembering Scots each year—made him feel like a “Nazi” so antagonistic was its portrayal of the English at the battlefield. A life-size mannequin of Cumberland at the entrance depicted a man “fat as a sumo wrestler” with something of a sneer on his face. Prince Charlie’s mannequin, however, cut a rather svelte, dashing figure, so there was no doubt about who to pull for here.

  That was the “old” interpretation. The new center had just opened, however, and it addressed a lot of concerns about the balance of the Scots versus the English, including the fact that there were Scots on both sides. There was a bagpipe on display that is said to have been removed from the field, but no one knows exactly which side it belonged to. That’s because—though not everyone wants to admit to it—the Highlanders had their pipers, but so did the English, whose army included Lowland Scots and even a scattering of Highlanders. (The Scottish courts of justice once ruled that a man carrying bagpipes was a man carrying a weapon, so inspiring was the music of the pipers to the clans in battle.) There also was an electronic display that illuminated the movements of the armies across the field and which made it abundantly clear just how easily the English accomplished their victory. Their triumph was decisive; it very effectively put an end to the dreams of rebellion.

  The battlefield was open and atmospherically quiet. Other than the sound of cars passing in the distance, the moor catches only the wind and the occasional words of visitors, like me. I walked freely around the site (not all the original battlefield is open, only that portion, about one-third, overseen by the National Trust for Scotland) and found a mass grave where some of the English soldiers are buried. A twenty-foot-high stone monument from 1858 nearby carries an inscription honoring “gallant Highlanders who fought for Scotland and Prince Charlie.” The Leanach Cottage on the site is where Jacobite soldiers lay wounded and where as many as thirty were killed by the duke’s men. The original structure no longer exists; the cottage has been reconstructed, though there is a sense of gloom about it. There are stones scattered about the field that marked where men fell, and another on which the duke of Cumberland is said to have stood while directing the battle. The stones are sad memorials. Everything about Culloden seemed sad to me. I spent many hours there, being unable to pull myself away, and I regretted leaving. But I also was grateful to depart; this is not a place where hearts are at ease. I wondered again what Boswell and Johnson would have made of it.

  16

  Northeast Scotland

  After a comfortable overnight stay nearby, I ventured out on yet another sunny morning to see something else Boswell and Johnson missed: Clava Cairn, prehistoric burial chambers that date from about 2000 B.C. The site is reached by a narrow road flanked by farmland along the River Nairn. Only one other car was there when I arrived and its occupants left soon after I got there. There was no on-site staff, so I was alone as I walked through the standing stones, some with low covered entranceways and large, open central chambers. I was amazed once again to be so close and unrestricted around these ancient cairns. Interestingly, as far as I could tell, there were no evidences of recent vandalism.

  My real target was Cawdor Castle, however, for Boswell and Johnson visited there, and it has, of course, the association with Shakespeare’s Macbeth; the witches’ prediction that Macbeth will become thane of Cawdor fuels his ultimately tragic desire to be king. History doesn’t mix well with legend once again, however, for the castle dates from the early fourteenth century, long after the real events occurred upon which Shakespeare based his play. Nonetheless, I wanted to see for myself if being thane of Cawdor amounted to a suitable reward for Macbeth in the play.

  I spotted a sign which said the castle was only one mile away; I drove three miles and never saw the entrance. I did, however, find another sign while coming from the opposite direction that said the same thing: one mile to go. I did a back-and-forth maneuver for about fifteen minutes before giving up and driving into the fairytalelike, almost precious, village of Cawdor with its stone cottages and every other building apparently a tearoom. I found out that the castle wasn’t open for the season yet, and the entranceway signs had been taken down so as not to encourage people like me. No one invited me in for tea, so I left, not wanting to part with any money in a place that obviously didn’t want me around. And besides, Macbeth isn’t my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays anyway.

  Boswell and Dr. Johnson had their own conflicts during their visit, though Boswell’s description made the castle sound exactly the way most Americans expect a castle to appear. “The old tower must be of great antiquity,” he wrote. “There is a drawbridge, what has been a moat, and a court. There is a hawthorn tree in one of the rooms, still undecayed, that is to say, the stock still remains. The tower has been built round it by a strange conceit. The thickness of the walls, the small slanting windows, and a great iron door at the entrance on the second storey, coming up the stairs, all indicate the rude times in which this building h
as been erected. There is a great deal of additional building 250 years old.”

  The minister at Cawdor, Kenneth Macaulay, got on Johnson’s nerves when he spoke disparagingly of the English clergy. “This is a day of novelties,” Johnson told Boswell. “I have seen trees in Scotland, etc., and I have heard the English clergy treated with disrespect.” Johnson couldn’t let the subject rest, either; at another point on the journey he called Macaulay “ignorant as a bull” and later even labeled him a “bastard.” Macaulay did a service for the travelers, however, by providing them with instructions to assist in navigating their route from Inverness to Skye. I heard later that the castle has been well kept; the Campbells of Cawdor live there, and its rooms, dungeons, and turrets are open to the public, if you get there at the right time of year. I’ve heard tell a visit is most enjoyable.

  One thing I saw was that the women in this particular area appeared perfectly normal. That was a point of some interest because of what I had read about them from William Thomson, who visited this neighborhood in 1785, just twelve years after Boswell and Johnson dropped by. Thomson had observed the approximate location of Shakespeare’s scene between Macbeth and the witches, and found it “judiciously chosen, for all the women in this part of the country have the appearance of midnight hags. They only want the cauldron and the broom-stick to complete them for the stage.” I’m going to venture a guess here that Thomson never attempted a second trip to this area.