Love Scotland podcast – Season 7

Transcript

Five voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Alistair Moffat [AM]; Derek Alexander [DA]; Iona Fyfe [IF]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

[Applause]

[JB]
Hello and welcome to a special live recording of the Love Scotland podcast. We’re in Aberdeen with an enthusiastic audience to explore a turbulent period in Scottish history. For the majority of people who study history, it involves hours in libraries, poring over manuscripts and leafing through textbooks. But my two guests today are very physical explorers of history.

War Paths is the title of a new book by acclaimed writer and historian Alistair Moffat, in which he sets off in the footsteps of the fighting men of Scotland’s clans, taking us through key historical moments and battles that would change the country forever. Meanwhile, Derek Alexander is the National Trust for Scotland’s Head of Archaeology – our very own Indiana Jones! Derek has dug his way around much of Scotland; the Trust has approximately 12,000 archaeological sites. But unlike the movie action hero, Derek’s adventures are real! Welcome to our guests.

[Applause]

[JB]
Now Alistair, your book deals with a number of battles across the Jacobite era. And although all the strategic battle details are there, your quest was human. You said you wanted to understand the clansmen and the warriors. Why?

[AM]
Because they fought essentially with bladed weapons, just as the Roman legionaries did, just as the Greek hoplites did. They had pistols and muskets to some extent – as Derek will attest – but most of them had a dirk and a sword, and a little shield. And so, they were extraordinarily successful fighting against modern armies who were equipped with muskets, who had cannon, who had pistols and so on. And yet they won again, and again, and again. And I wanted to try and understand why that was. I think there were really two approaches I had. It was clear to me that because their major, their sole tactic in fact was the Highland Charge. That’s how they won, and I wanted to understand why that was so effective. That was the first thing. The second thing that I was interested in was courage – sheer, physical courage. To charge ranks of often professional soldiers with cannon in place and their muskets at the ready, and you have a bladed weapon. Now that takes guts to do that; that takes physical courage. I wanted to try to understand that.

You mentioned in your very generous introduction – thank you! – that I like to go to places in order to understand what happened. I believe profoundly in the idea of genius loci – the spirit of place – except I translate it as ‘places of spirits’. If you go to somewhere that’s atmospheric … and we’ve all been to places like Iona and so on which are like that, that have atmosphere. But to try and understand how a battle happened and why it happened in a particular place, if you go to the place you also understand the mechanics of it, the physical logistics of it, as well as the spirit of the place. Derek will confirm this, because we were talking beforehand, these are places where many people died. They deserve respect without any doubt, and some of them are even unmarked – like Tippermuir outside Perth. You can’t find it, whereas Killiecrankie the Trust do a great job, and at Culloden too. And so, I wanted to go to these places to understand how the clansmen’s physical courage was translated into victory, what happened. As I said, the Charge was their sole tactic; if the Charge failed, they lost.

[JB]
That’s a great start. We will go into the Charge in greater detail because it was phenomenally successful. Derek, what about you? When you are out and about, as the job necessitates, is it all about the science? Or do you ever get that spine-tingling moment?

[DA]
Every now and again. As an archaeologist, my job is about understanding people in the past from what they’ve left behind. Very much we joke about it in the department – a department of 2 – that we’re landscape detectives. Understanding things in their context and how they came to be and what’s the evidence for telling those stories. That’s really key to understanding. I very rarely get that ‘have you found something that makes the hairs stand up on their back of your neck’ vibe. But I did when we were digging at Glenshiel – a Jacobite battle of 1719.

All of my volunteers had left and I went to check one of the sites that they had previously found a number of remains of ammunition that had been fired by the thing that won the battle at Glenshiel, which is these Coehorn mortars. They could fire uphill and the Jacobites were in these wonderful positions that they should have held because it was up slopes like that. I’ve walked up those slopes, and it gets back to the understanding of topography and what an effect that has on battles. It’s impossible. The only way government forces there were going to do that was to have the support of this artillery. I was out on my own with a metal detector, just checking a couple of spots and I found more parts of the mortar shell. A mortar shell is basically a spherical bomb with a fuse in it. If you think ‘comedy bomb’ – somebody running about like that with a fuse burning, this is exactly what it was. I bent down and picked out this, which is a fragment of Coehorn mortar shell that still has the hole where the fuse went in, which burnt down and exploded and basically sent the Jacobites – Lord George Murray on that side on the Jacobite right wing – heading for the hills. I looked around and there was nobody to share that moment with! It was like 300 years to the day that it had been fired, and it was in my hand. That’s probably the most recent time that that moment of spine tingling had actually happened. As an archaeologist you find a lot of things, but that was great.

[JB]
Do battlefields present any specific challenges to an archaeologist?

[DA]
Absolutely, because what archaeology is normally about is structural remains – you’re looking at houses and burials and that sort of thing. Battlefields are very irregular. They’re mobile things; people are moving all the time. Certain types of archaeology will survive. All the organic remains in Scotland’s acidic soils – leather, clothes, bones – will disintegrate. The things that we end up looking for are the things that survive best. You’re not looking here at pottery and glass, which is what you get on domestic sites; you’re looking at munitions like lead musket balls, pistol shot, pieces of artillery. If you were very very lucky, or unlucky, then you’re looking for a mass grave or something. But even then, the only thing that would probably mark that out would be a concentration of metal artefacts because the bones probably don’t survive.

[JB]
Mmm. Well, let’s talk about one of the earliest battles on the site, which as you say Alistair, happens to be looked after by the National Trust for Scotland: Killiecrankie. I’ll briefly set the scene. July 1689, part of the Jacobite Rising led by John Graham of Claverhouse, known to most of us as Bonnie Dundee, in support of the exiled king James VII & II. Alistair, why choose Killiecrankie?

[AM]
If you go there, what you see, even though the A9 slashes right through the middle of the battlefield, if you go there to the NTS centre and then walk down by the gorge – because Killiecrankie is a very very steep gorge – you see the concentration of roots and roads and railways and so on squashed into this. You understand the strategy, the importance of it as a strategic place. If you walk past the centre, down into the gorge and then up through the village and you get to the battlefield, even though the artics are thundering up to Inverness and so on on the A9, you nevertheless get a sense of the ground immediately. What Dundee liked, and the clan chiefs liked, was the sloping ground – that was important. It was really important for the Charge that they had what the Gaels called the advantage of the brae. George Murray, whom Derek mentioned, joked after the ’45 that even a haggis could charge downhill. If you’re charging downhill, clearly your momentum is greater.

The other good thing about Killiecrankie was that it was not boggy, and it still isn’t boggy! There’s a river – the Gurnock – that runs down into the Garry on one side, which is very rocky with huge boulders. You’re protected on one flank. What Dundee does is dispose the clans up the hill. General Mackay marches the government army through the gorge and he’s downhill, and he knows he’s got problems.

[JB]
Before we get to the action, what would the Highland army have looked like?

[AM]
What they looked like? I think they would have looked absolutely splendid. People think that Highlanders are sort of raggedy vagabonds – the bare-arsed banditti as they called them – but they were not. Some of these chiefs were dressed in their war splendour. They wore costumes that were scaly with gold and so on; they really dressed up. They looked fantastic; they rode white horses. There’s a description of the muster before Killiecrankie in Lochaber, which is extremely detailed, written by a man called James Phillip. It details what the chiefs wear. They are a rainbow of colours. The ordinary clansmen would have looked a little less splendid, I think, but nevertheless you went to war looking terrific. That was very important because it fed your sense of yourself; it fed your courage, that you looked the part, you were a great soldier.

[DA]
I think also it probably would reflect a full range of society – you’re going from the chiefs to the guys at the bottom as well. Also, there would have been that range of different dress and armaments.

[JB]
Let’s talk about this Highland Charge. It was there to create – I think it’s in your book – ‘operational paralysis’. That was its aim. What was the arrangement? Because it wasn’t just a load of ferocious warriors running amok.

[AM]
That’s right. It wasn’t a crazy melee of ululating savages running down the hill at all. It was perfected by an extraordinary man called Alistair McCulloch …

[JB]
Who wasn’t Scottish?

[AM]
He was a Macdonald general; he was a Macdonald.

[JB]
But he was of Irish descent?

[AM]
People forget that the Clan Donald have an Irish and Ulster branch. He is a Gael – let’s call him that. Alistair fought in Ulster in the 1640s and there is documentary evidence that he did something different. The Charge used to be as you described Jackie, but what he began to do was to perfect it, essentially the format. It didn’t always happen – it didn’t happen at Culloden – but I’m pretty certain it happened at Killiecrankie. What the clans would do would be to charge within about 50 yards of the lines of musketeers, let’s call them. As Derek will confirm, muskets are not accurate over 50 yards. That’s where courage comes in. You charge and you stop, and they fire at you. Then, what the Highlanders did was to charge even closer, and any that had muskets or pistols would fire them. When you’ve got the old flash in the pan, when you’ve got gunpowder, gun smoke is billowing; there’s loads of it, it’s like a fog. In the fog, McCulloch got his men to form wedges. 12, 10, 14 men, all related to each other, brothers …

[JB]
Why all related?

[AM]
Because the clansmen were. Wedges were put together with people who were brothers, who were uncles and nephews and cousins and so on. Although modern soldiers fight for their mates and fight for their country and for their king, the clansmen fought for their families. You put the oldest man in front because he knew what to expect, and they charged, and the wedges broke through. Once they got in behind a Redcoat line (let’s call it), the battle was over because these men were tremendous swordsmen. They were taught from childhood as swordsmen. Their weapons would have been razor-sharp; a glancing blow would slice into you. Once they got behind, it was all over.
At Prestonpans, which takes place in 1745, the battle lasted less than 10 minutes, because the Highlanders (the Camerons) broke through immediately.

[JB]
There’s a great passage in your book – you have your book in front of you, could you find it for us? – it tells us what it was like – it’s a primary source – of what it was like to be on the receiving end of a Highland Charge.

[AM]
That’s right. And this is at Killiecrankie. The lovely thing, Jackie, is that this is a guy who was a private solider; he wasn’t a general or an aristocrat or a clan chief or anything like that. He’s a man called Donald McBane, who was a tobacco spinner from Inverness! He left a record of what happened:

‘The Macdonalds came on down the hill upon us without either shoe, stocking or bonnet on their head. [The Highlanders stripped off to charge.] They gave a shout and then the fire began on both sides and continued a hot dispute for an hour. Then they broke in upon us with sword and targe and Lochaber axes, which obliged us to give way. Seeing my captain sore-wounded, and a great many more with heads lying cloven on every side, I was sadly affrighted. A Highlander attacked me with sword and targe and cut my wooden-handled bayonet out of the muzzle of my gun. I then clubbed my gun and gave him a stroke with it, which made the butt end fly off. Seeing the Highland men come fast upon me, I took to my heels and ran 30 miles before I looked behind me. [Laughter] Every person I saw or met, I took for my enemy.’

It’s a wonderful description because the other thing that I forget anyway is the sheer terror of watching this coming at you; and to stand fast, not to move, was an achievement. These men were terrific swordsmen and absolutely committed. As I was saying earlier, they won again and again and again. We think of Culloden as a disaster. But before Culloden, they were undefeated.

[JB]
Poor old Donald McBane. He was from Inverness – the background to Alistair’s quote there is that he joined the British army for some excitement. I think he got it!

[AM]
He did.

[JB]
All that ammunition – that must be manna for you, Derek. We hear about government troops carrying lead balls in their mouths and spitting them into their muskets.

[DA]
Well, that allows you to load quicker instead of going to your pouch to get the cartridge out, if you’ve not got the cartridge with the charge in it. Most of them would have had them in a pouch at the front and would be putting it in and ramming it down and then trying to fire it. Of course, at Killiecrankie some of them are using matchlock muskets which are quite old – you need to fire flash in the pan. Some of the others will have flintlocks, where that’s what’s firing. That’s what forms the archaeological record. You’re talking thousands and thousands of these things. If you’ve got, at Killiecrankie, 2,500 Jacobites on one side and 3,500 government troops on the other side all firing muskets, even if the government troops only get 3 rounds off like they say before the Charge hits home, you’re talking tens of thousands of musket balls. They should be out there marking concentrations.

[JB]
Have you found much?

[DA]
The National Trust for Scotland owns the area of the Pass going through, and Soldier’s Leap where McBane jumps across; we don’t own the bit beyond, which is where the main battle is. But as part of the A9 improvement, the widening of it, a lot of archaeological work has been undertaken there by commercial archaeology companies. What they use, and one of the best methods for doing battlefield archaeology, is metal detecting. They’ve got lots and lots of concentrations of musket balls, buttons – if people are coming and swinging a sword at you, it’s not just bits of flesh that are flying off. Anything like belts, …

[JB]
Buckles would be the least of your worries, wouldn’t it?!

[DA]
Exactly! That’s the sort of material culture that would be distributed on battlefields that you’ll get in concentrations.

[JB]
Alright. Let’s just say that Killiecrankie, although they were vastly outnumbered, was a great victory. 3 weeks later, not so much. A hasty second Rising at the Battle of Dunkeld. Briefly, I’d like to talk about the Battle of Dunkeld just before we go to the break, because that is where that advantage of the braes did not work. It couldn’t work because it wasn’t in such a rural hill.

[AM]
That’s right. Dunkeld is a beautiful town and it was a substantial settlement then with a cathedral that had been completed 50 years before. What happened was the government forces occupied the cathedral precinct and built up a wall around it. I often think of a parallel with Rorke’s Drift and Zulu, that amazing film. Dundee was killed at Killiecrankie, which was a great blow to the rebellion. Nevertheless, they carried on and they attacked Dunkeld. But they have to attack up the streets of this town.

[JB]
They’d been lured into Dunkeld, hadn’t they?

[AM]
Well, it’s not clear why strategically they thought it was so important. They could have bypassed it, frankly. Nevertheless, they take on the Cameronians, who were occupying the precinct, and they charged up what’s now Cathedral Street. And it’s narrow. The houses are still the houses they were then – it’s not much wider than from the edge of your chair to the edge of Derek’s. It’s really narrow. Of course, there’s no mass. So what the Cameronians are able to do is pick off the Highlanders frankly – the absolute smash of the Charge is not possible because they’ve also got this barrier. Eventually, after a day of this approximately, they retire; they have to give up because the ground is wrong. It will not work for them.

[JB]
Derek, have we managed to extract anything from there?

[DA]
From Dunkeld, we’ve excavated an area around Stanley Hill. The National Trust for Scotland owns that part of the town, and that side – the north side – was the bit that was burnt. One of the parts of the tactics of the attacking Jacobites and the defending Cameronians was to set fire to some of the thatched buildings where people were taking cover and firing from. A big part of the town was actually burnt and we’ve lost one of the streets that used to lead up to Dunkeld House, which did survive the battle but in fact burnt down a couple of hundred years later. There are elements there that we can pick up, and people have come to us with musket balls from their back gardens in Dunkeld over the years. It’s an interesting site and it’s a forgotten side of things.
We’re talking about Killiecrankie as being a great victory, but the impact on some of the charging – the Macdonalds on the left flank of the Jacobite force – they took a huge number of casualties from the volley fire as well. Even though the Highland Charge could work, it could take big casualties as you were exposed coming in. Troops that were able to withstand the terrifying sight of these guys coming at them.

[AM]
They were disciplined; that’s the key.

[JB]
Absolute discipline.

[AM]
Apart from Donald McBane, who ran for it!

[JB]
Let me instil some discipline here. We’ll stop for a second because, as befits a live podcast, we also have some live music. In a few short years, Aberdeenshire’s Iona Fyfe has become one of Scotland’s best known traditional folk singers. We are delighted to have her here today. Appropriately, the Battle of Killiecrankie offers us the perfect chance to hear some songs. First, Iona will be performing ‘Ye Jacobites by name’, a song that I only recently discovered was in fact anti-Jacobite and anti-war in nature, despite seeming to be a rousing call to arms. Please join me in welcoming Iona Fyfe.

[Applause]

[Iona sings ‘Ye Jacobites by name’]

[Applause]

[JB]
Thank you to Iona. And there will be more from Iona later in the podcast.

[MV]
A donation to the National Trust for Scotland, no matter how small, will help to protect the places that make Scotland so special. With your help, we can respond quickly to mountain wildfires or fix damage from winter storms, and we can carry out vital work to ensure historical sites and fragile wildlife survive for future generations.
Just search National Trust for Scotland and click Donate.

[JB]
Welcome back to this special Love Scotland podcast where we are discussing the strategic and physical history of some of the conflicts of Jacobite Scotland. Alistair Moffat, we’ve discussed the Highland Charge and how it was exceptional when it worked. We’ve already alluded to Culloden when it did not work; that was another destination in your journey in your book. You called your chapter on Culloden ‘The army of the dead’ – why?

[AM]
Because of something unique to clansmen that happened that day, what the Gaels called beul-aithris – literally ‘mouth history’, something that wasn’t written down. When they decided to fight in April 1746, the ground was a huge issue. It was not properly settled. There was also an idea that the Jacobite army, knowing that the Duke of Cumberland’s forces were approaching essentially from here, from Aberdeen, from the east – that they would march to Nairn and surprise them in their camp. But it didn’t work. It was also raining, and they were very very short of supplies, and so when the Jacobite army drew up at Culloden on Drummossie Moor, they essentially stood as they always did in clan groups; as I say, these were family armies. The government army march onto the field with their standards snapping in the wind, and they’re twiddling their drums, and their sergeant majors are shouting at the men ‘look to your fronts’, ‘stand fast’ and so on. They hear something coming across the battlefield; they’re about 400/500 yards away I think, Derek? So, they’re not close, but they hear what they think are psalms being sung. Soldiers often did that before battle because they were going to be closer to their god, many of them, by the end of the day.

But the Highlanders were not singing psalms. What they were doing was reciting their genealogy. Each man could go back 25 generations and they would recite and go back through the generations. The reason they did that was to centre themselves before the Charge. They had to remember who they were. They called Lowlanders cow-herds and people with no ancestry to speak of. Their ancestors were important and what they were doing, as you said Jackie, is they were summoning the army of the dead. The dead and all of their ancient glory, all of their war prowess, all of their splendour – they would charge beside them as they charged across the moor. It didn’t happen like that, sadly. But this was something that was attested at the Battle of Harlaw, as early as 1411, that the Highlanders did this. It’s unique to Gaelic culture, and it gives a sense of why they were there, why they were fighting. They were fighting for their history, for their land, for their homeplaces, for their culture. And of course, Culloden turned out to be a disaster.

The ground was disastrously bad, and still is very boggy. If you go to the NTS site, you will see it – pools of water. It forced the clans to slew into each other, so they were never able to form the wedges properly. The government army were much more disciplined this time. They got off lots of cannonade; in fact that’s what made the Atholl Brigade charge. They fired what they called canister shot, also called grape shot, which one government officer said ploughed lanes through the clansmen. It was devastating.

[JB]
What were the numbers in the battle?

[AM]
It’s difficult to be accurate. As ever, the government army outnumbered the Jacobites. At Falkirk, the January before, there were 8,000 Jacobites – it was the largest army that ever fought for them – but it had thinned out. I guess there were about 4,000/4,500 – something like that.

[JB]
Derek, how much of Culloden has been excavated?

[DA]
Oh! Hardly anything.

[JB]
Really? I imagine you’ve gone over that with a fine tooth comb.

[DA]
Again, it comes down to the opportunities to undertake fieldwork. The National Trust for Scotland owns everything to the south of the current road that was moved in the 1980s. That really takes in only about half of the deployment of the government troops; there’s more of the Jacobite troops on that side, on our ground. But then you look at the areas outside that, where the cavalry engagements took place on the left flank of the government troops (and even on their right flank). The opportunities were taken when the new visitor centre went in, when the car park’s going in – these things are done over time. Tony Pollard and I did research excavations before we built the visitor centre in 2007 to get a better understanding of the battlefield. In fact, if you go to the visitor centre now, many of the artefacts that were uncovered in that piece of fieldwork, which was mostly metal detecting, are on display.

[JB]
Ok, so whenever anyone says we’re going to build a visitor centre and car park, that’s manna for you as an archaeologist!

[DA]
Yes!

[JB]
Why can’t you just pick a site and say ‘we’re going to dig here’?

[DA]
We do as well. One thing about battlefields and understanding battlefields is doing a big area probably won’t help you. It’s about understanding the concentration of artefacts and how they’re distributed across the landscape, and understanding how that landscape has had an impact on the way the battle evolved over time during the day. Over the last few years, we’ve been doing further bits of fieldwork – we’ve been looking at the second line of the government troops. We were looking at the left flank, where the dragoons went out to go through the Culwhinniac Enclosure. In a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll be going to look at an area closer into the concentration of the fighting actually took place.

[JB]
Is that how you determine who was where, by the nature of the armaments? How does it work?

[DA]
There’s a bit of that, but Culloden is one of these battles that we’re very blessed with in terms of having multiple varieties of battlefield maps drawn at the time that pretty much show where individual regiments were, and we can start to play about with how they would have moved over the course of the battle. There are a couple of points that you can fix them in the landscape. We know where the edge of one of the enclosures were – the Culwhinniac enclosure formed the right-hand flank of the Jacobites as they lined up. We know approximately where the Culloden Parks were. That was the line when the Jacobites march out from their camp, they’re in columns and they march out onto the battlefield and they just take up a line onto that and then they turn and face the government troops as they’re coming forward. So, we know where those places are.

We know that they were actually set up slightly obliquely. A lot of these maps shows them as being like that, parallel. But because one side had moved forward to take cover of some stone dykes on the right-hand flank, that actually obliquely shifted the whole line, which meant the right-hand side of the Jacobites was closer to the government troops. [Much closer] They had less ground to cover. That’s the side of Jacobites that actually managed to engage, but they take such a beating because of the close musketry and cannon fire and then the second line coming in, that the other side of the line doesn’t actually reach. The left-hand flank of the Jacobites – the Macdonalds – get so far, let off a few volleys – but in fact by the time they’re over there, the right-hand side is already being repulsed. When you see that happening, there’s no way you’re going forward, so you start coming back yourself.

[JB]
Why such a bad choice of location, as we’ve heard, that did not play to their strengths?

[AM]
Well, one of the good things about Culloden is that in addition to the maps there’s also lots of written record. But it doesn’t always tally. People have different views of why what happened, happened. George Murray was in no doubt that the ground was wrong and they shouldn’t have fought in that place. Colonel John O’Sullivan, who was the Irish advisor to Prince Charles, he wanted to fight somewhere else – behind the visitor centre in the car park!

[JB]
Let’s hide behind that visitor centre!

[AM]
The car park was good ground! But nevertheless, there was lots and lots of dispute. The difficulty was that also, crucially, when the government army start this cannonade, there’s a kind of operational paralysis. They don’t do anything. Prince Charles doesn’t give an order to charge and when he does, the young man who had the order, had his head blown off with a cannonball. That’s why Colonel Harry Kerr is riding up and down the line, and the MacDonald regiments who are out on the left are 700 yards away? A long way away. And there’s bog between them. So, the government army is like that … and the Highlanders are like that. The Camerons are on the right and much closer, and so Kerr rides to try to get them to charge in echelon. He starts with the Macdonald regiments, who are insulted to be there on the left – that was a disaster for them, and their chiefs were not happy.

[JB]
Why?

[AM]
Because the place of honour is on the right. When the Clan Cameron, judged the bravest of the clans, they charge and despite the canister shot ploughing lanes through them, they actually break the first line. They break through, which is extraordinary. The second line, which was some distance away – you think 100 yards?

[DA]
Probably 100 yards because they have to leave enough room to manoeuvre that entire regiment, which is about 80 metres long.

[JB]
Even though we’re talking about the extraordinary bravery of the clansmen, they were not always well served by their commanders. There’s something in your book that George Murray was regarded, perhaps until then, as a great strategist. You wrote that someone had written at the time ‘if Prince Charles had fallen asleep for a year after the muster at Glenfinnan, he would have awakened with a crown on his head if it had all been left to Lord George Murray.’ So, Prince Charles didn’t cover himself in glory.

[AM]
He didn’t, and I agree with that estimate. Murray, I think was the outstanding strategic mind. He didn’t want to fight; he wanted the Jacobites to control the whole of Scotland because his judgement was that the Seven Years War that was taking place in Europe would soak up so much government material as well as men that they could hold Scotland, that they could do that. Prince Charles – I don’t believe that he was as feckless as he may appear. He was clearly a charismatic young man; he was only 24. He comes with one ship, drops anchor off Eriskay and he’s got seven old men with him and a few Clanranald soldiers. He comes to Glenfinnan and there’s nobody there! It looks like a disaster until the Camerons come. He’s clearly got charisma; he’s clearly got something about him. There’s no question in my mind about that, at the beginning.

[JB]
But he was no battle strategist.

[AM]
He was no battle strategist; I think he was an inspirer of men. I think he did that. For goodness sake, they got to Derby within 120 miles of London – that was an amazing achievement. Prestonpans sent a shiver of shock through Britain, that these primitive savages with their swords whirling above their heads could cut to pieces a government army in 10 minutes. Everybody thought ‘my god, what’s coming’?
But of course, in the Council of War (let’s call it that) the clan chiefs had different views; Murray and O’Sullivan were generally at daggers drawn; and so on. It was not a unified command, I don’t think. I think that’s the import of what you just quoted, Jackie. If Murray had seriously been in charge, with total control, yes I think it could have gone differently.

[DA]
But then the big issue with that is that you can’t plan for the unexpected. The night march went wrong. The surprise attack didn’t happen. They were tired …

[JB]
They got back, they hadn’t slept, they hadn’t eaten …

[DA]
They didn’t expect the government army to be coming so quickly. That’s war; that’s the nature of warfare. No matter how well you plan, there’s going to be things you’re not expecting. Actually, the ground at Culloden, they actually had their flanks pretty secure. If they’d held the right flank and stopped the government dragoons getting through the walls of the enclosure – there was a bit of debate about who was going to defend that side, it seems to have fallen through. If that had been held, they’d have had more of a chance.

[JB]
What about your methods? You mentioned earlier metal detectors, which sounds a very 20th-century tool [yeah!] – is that still the best?

[DA]
You know what? It is for battlefield archaeology because what you’re doing is you’re plotting concentrations of munitions and that tells you roughly where people were standing. What we have been using for modelling the terrain is LiDAR – laser scanning from Bourne’s Survey. That gives us a 3D model of the landscape, and the landscape is a key thing in the understanding of the Battle of Culloden in what you can see. It’s on a ridge. The guys on the left can’t see the guys on the right. They guys going through the enclosures can’t see folk, so they don’t know they’re being out-flanked on the right flank, the Jacobites, because they can’t see over that side. So, when you’ve got cavalry suddenly appearing in your rear, that sends a shiver through everybody. When that happens, you know … You can hold it off for so long but then it starts to go downhill quite rapidly from there.

[JB]
Do we know everything there is to know at this stage about the weaponry, about the injuries?

[AM]
Yes, I think there’s a good deal of information about that. Most Highlanders, as Derek was saying, you see shot fired on both sides. Many of them did have firearms although they were not their primary weapons. If a Highlander was right-handed, he would have a targe, which was not much bigger than these books. A shield, and a dirk, and his sword in his right hand. The targe was for parrying. It wasn’t for protecting your whole body like a legionary’s shield. If you were facing a bayonet, or ranks of bayonets, you knocked them up. The way the Highlanders charged was called ag dul scios, which means ‘going down’ because they ran at an angle. Also to avoid musketeers, because they tended to fire high, and so they wanted to avoid the musket balls. They were ready to knock up a bayonet and thrust – that was how it worked. That’s why the wedges were successful because they were able to get through one rank. If you got through one, momentum was everything. Absolutely everything.

Again, at Tippermuir for example, outside Perth, they broke through in many places. Alistair McCulloch’s Irish Brigade in particular broke through in many places. The Covenanter army commander, Lord Elcho, just froze because it was all falling apart. When that happened, it was all over. But at Culloden, the impression I have is that it all got bogged down. It wasn’t dynamic; there was no momentum. Although the Camerons broke through, James Wolfe, of Plains of Abraham fame, closed it up with Barrel’s Regiment.

[DA]
He comes in from the second line.

[AM]
That’s right. There’s a very very good description of that and how they did it. What happened at Culloden was the ferocity and the elan of the clans was cancelled by the terrain, by their exhaustion as you said – they were hungry and tired – but also countered by really terrific discipline.

[JB]
Derek, it seems unbelievable almost that such an important battle in Scottish and British history – global some say because of the ramifications had it gone the other way – such an important site is under threat. It’s constantly under threat.

[DA]
It appears to be constantly under threat. We’ve managed to check quite a few developments over time. There have been some house sites that have been built round some of the farmsteads and things that are there in the 19th century. Of course, it’s an ever-evolving landscape and it changed from 1746 onwards. Things were knocked down. The Culloden Parks were removed and are no longer visible. Parts of the turf dykes that formed the Culwhinniac enclosure have been ploughed flat, and we’ve actually rebuilt parts of those so people can fix themselves in the landscape again. We’ve had roads going through and things moved. Landscapes will always change.

The threats are real, but I would say Culloden is one of the better-protected battlefields in Scotland, probably because we know so much about it. We know very much where individual elements of it happened. As soon as you draw a line round anything on a map, there’s always a boundary and something close to the edge; there’s something you’ll see from the viewpoint. One of the things about Culloden is its sense of place. I think the biggest threat to Culloden is an impact on the feeling that you get when you go there. That open landscape, the wind blowing – if you go there in April and you’re on your own, it’s ‘wow, this is some place’.

[JB]
I interviewed Diana Gabaldon recently, the author of the phenomenally successful Outlander, who was moved to tears by just describing being there.
Let’s end where we started, Alistair. You said in the book’s introduction that you wanted to understand the warriors and where that much-feared courage had come from. What did you discover at the end of your journey?

[AM]
I think what I found was that these warriors in the 17th and 18th century were amongst the most feared in Europe. They almost toppled the British state; that is something that needs to be remembered. This was seismic; and Culloden, as you were saying earlier Jackie, was a place where history turned. There’s no question about that.

What I found – you try and put yourself in the position of both sides – in terms of the Highlanders, it was kinship, it was the sense of the past, and so on. But it was also the belief that you were with people who would protect you as well as fight alongside you. That’s not necessarily the case in many armies. I think that was the main thing. The other thing that was clear to me was the Culloden really was … I’m always suspicious about stories that talk about turning points, but Culloden was; there’s no doubt. It was followed by a genocide. It was followed by mass theft, rape – all sorts of dreadful things went on in the summer of 1746, but most of all people began to leave. They began to depart. The theme of Highland history after 1746 was departure, and Culloden was the huge stimulus in that. There were many other factors but that was a huge and dramatic moment in Highland history. That blasted heath, that empty place is more than a metaphor; it’s how the landscape began to look after April 1746.

[JB]
How evocative. Thanks to Alistair Moffat, whose book War Paths is out now, and to Derek Alexander who’ll continue to dig deep into Scotland’s history for the Trust. And thanks to you all for listening, whether it’s here in Aberdeen or through the Love Scotland podcast.

As you may already know, Culloden Moor is under threat from increased planning applications. The National Trust for Scotland has launched a Fighting Fund to help push against insensitive developments. It allows the Trust to continue to protect this hugely significant site, so if you’d like to support the Fighting Fund, you can do so at nts.org.uk/donate or by texting CULLODEN to 70970, which will donate £5. You can find out more information on the Fighting Fund by clicking the link on the online details for this episode.

We’re going to finish with some more music – a haunting song that perhaps best captures the poignant end of those daring Jacobite campaigns. My thanks to Iona Fyfe, who will take us out with ‘The Skye Boat Song’.
From all of us here, goodbye.

[Iona sings ‘The Skye Boat Song’]

[Applause]

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.
For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.