Last month I visited Culloden Moor, the site of the battle that ended once and for all the Jacobite Rebellion and the Stuarts’ hopes of regaining the throne. It was actually a return visit for me - I was first there in 1965, begrudgingly accompanied by a boyfriend whose ideas about how to spend a summer holiday did not accord with mine. The relationship was doomed and trudging across a windswept battlefield can only have hastened its demise.
In 1965 there was no Visitors’ Centre at Culloden. Now there’s a restaurant and a gift shop, an audio-guide, an interactive indoor exhibit, weapon demonstrations (with audience participation), and a slightly nausea-inducing surround sound-and-vision reconstruction of how it might have felt to be in the thick of the battle. Strictly in conformity with health and safety guidelines, I’m sure. Back at our hotel I got into conversation with another guest. ‘Ah yes,’ she sighed. ‘We did Culloden yesterday. Waste of a morning, really. It’s just a moor. But did you try the coffee with Drambuie?’
Is there something perverse in me that preferred Culloden when it truly was ‘just a moor’?
Culloden is a bleak spot on the sunniest of days. On that April morning in 1746 when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men lined up, bellies empty, feet wet, it must have seemed a particularly hopeless place. The simple grave markers are a reminder of what followed. An hour or two of carnage. Bodies stripped by looters of anything of value and tumbled into mass pits. The pressed Highland clansmen, the Irish and the French in the Jacobite army, and the Duke of Cumberland’s well shod Royalist infantrymen. They were all far from home, whichever cause they died for.
Imagine though if some seer had said to them, ‘in the future, 250 years from now, people will come walking over your grave. “Nothing much to see here” they’ll say, and then they’ll go into a building, over there, to buy a wee teddy bear in a kilt and get a toasted sandwich.’
The disquiet I feel when I visit these places is vaguely akin to what I feel about the way children are taught history today. Modules. The juicy bits. The marketable elements. They are essentially those episodes of history that can be turned into a field trip. And if it’s just a boring old moor with a few wonky grave markers, never mind. You can always bring home a Battle of Bannockburn baseball cap. Why do they sell Bannockburn merchandise at Culloden? Well, it’s all Scotland isn’t it? And the gift-wrapped Prosecco and chocolate truffles? No, you’ve got me there. I wonder if it's a big seller?
I was discussing all this with an acquaintance who was involved in the search for the body of Richard III.
‘Baseball caps!’ he said. ‘That’s nothing. You should see what’s going on in Leicester these days. I mean, they lost his body for 400 years, couldn’t have cared less where they’d mislaid him, but now he’s been found they’re using him to sell sunglasses.’ Back in 1965 when Culloden was ‘just a moor’ it affected me profoundly. Here, it seemed to say, terrified men and boys stood in the Scotch drizzle and waited for death.
I wasn’t a historian. I was just a teenager who happened to have read John Prebble’s Fire and Sword trilogy. Would an interactive audio-visual exhibit have helped me to become better informed? Possibly. But would it have diluted and Disneyfied the raw reality of a battlefield? I think it would.
The Drambuie coffee though, I will agree, is very good indeed.