Understanding the story: some classroom activities

1. Interpreting evidence
Download the folders The Jacobite Army and The Government Army from the Resource Bank. These contain a range of sources which provide evidence for the state of both armies in the days and hours before the battle. These can be printed off or projected for class or group discussion.

Depending on the angle you and your class are taking with your work, you could simply choose a few sources likely to be of interest to your class and discuss them all together.
Another option is to divide your class into groups, asking some to collect information about the Government army, and others about the Jacobites, all based in their interpretations of the evidence available. Groups can then present their findings to the rest of the class, orally, through a PowerPoint presentation, as a poster. Less formally, individuals from different groups can pair up and exchange their thoughts and findings.

If this is too open-ended a task, ask pupils to collect information about the following, using the evidence available to them:

• approximate size of the army
• type of person who was in the army
• range of weapons
• morale
• information about the leader

Other images may be found on the SCRAN website – www.scran.ac.uk.
See the Resource Bank Teachers’ Notes section for more details.

2. The evidence jigsaw
What would be the best way of actually finding out what happened at Culloden? Pupils are likely to say ‘being there’. Even if this were possible, help them to see that if you were actually there, you would only find out part of the story – things might happen which you couldn’t see or didn’t know the background to. Explain how each piece of evidence we can find today can only tell part of the story – each piece is like a part of a jigsaw puzzle.

Explain to pupils that the Visitor Centre holds many pieces of evidence which historians and archaeologists have examined to piece together the story of Culloden – but that the story is still changing, as new evidence comes to light.

Discuss the types of evidence pupils have used in the previous activity. Can they group the evidence into types – written sources, images, objects (or words, pictures, things for less able or younger groups)? Help pupils to see that the more pieces of evidence available, the clearer the picture of the past we are able to build up.

3. Can we trust the evidence?
Point out to them also that sometimes evidence can be unreliable , The clan graves on the battlefield, for example, are marked with clan names, but they are likely to contain the bodies of members of other clans too, and, more critically, were not erected until over a century after the battle. The image of the battle of Culloden by Luke Sullivan, reproduced in the Battle section of the Resource Bank is a good focus for this kind of discussion – the artist was not present at the battle.

Discuss with pupils which types of evidence are the most reliable – and which the most unreliable. Can they rank the pieces of evidence in order of reliability – from the most reliable to the least? Even if the orders vary from group to group, the value in this activity is the consideration and the assessment of evidence, and in the recognition that evidence can be biased or unreliable. The BBC Scotland Around Scotland: Jacobites series is particularly strong in this area.

4. Timelines
The story of the ’45 is an exciting one, partly because everything happened so quickly – from Prince Charles’ arrival in Scotland to his undercover departure took only just over a year. To ensure that pupils have an understanding of the sequence of events from both sides in the months, weeks and days before the battle, construct two timelines around your classroom, one for the Jacobites and one for the Government side. This can be two strings stretched across a classroom wall with the months marked clearly on it, or dates could be marked on frieze paper. As your work unfolds and as pupils carry out their own research, events can be added to each side. Use clothes pegs, post-its or paper clips to shuffle and insert events as you find out about them, Timelines could also be developed on a class or individual spreadsheets, with pupils adding details.

Help pupils talk about the dates in a range of ways and become comfortable with the concept that the 1700s are in fact known as the 18th century. Help them work out how long ago this was; how many generations ago. Would your grandmother be alive then? No? well, what about her grandmother?

In the Visitor Centre the story of the Jacobite campaign is told on the right hand wall throughout and the Government story is on the left, in chronological order. After their visit, can pupils adds any further details to their timelines? Which events are the most significant on either side? At which point could events have turned out differently?

5. Eyewitnesses
Many people were caught up in the events of 1745, 1746, the battle and its terrible aftermath. Some of these people wrote of their experiences, either in letters and diaries at the time, or in memoirs or autobiographies later. A number of these accounts have been dramatised in both English and Gaelic and are available as audio stations in the Visitor Centre. Some of these audio accounts have been included as part of the BBC Around Scotland: Jacobites website www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/as/jacobites.
Pupils may enjoy listening to these in advance. Written eyewitness accounts may be found in the Battle section of the Resource Bank.

Encourage pupils to tackle these accounts critically – to think about what information might have been omitted, about the length of time between the event described and writing it down, in some cases many years later.

It is easy to highlight how differently people view events, even innocently, through getting pupils to report on a simple classroom incident. You could, for example, get another adult to enter your classroom unexpectedly, perhaps with a message for you, who, on the way out drops a personal item. A child may notice this and may volunteer to return it. Hours later, or even the next day, ask pupils to write down what happened, and then compare their reports. Details will be missed out, or in some cases added and events are likely to vary in sequence. Help pupils draw lessons from this in the way that eyewitnesses from the past report on events which they saw.

Many other useful activities relating to how we interpret evidence may be found in a downloadable teachers’ pack on Archaeology on the NTS Education website.