Love Scotland podcast – Season 7

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Robyne Calvert [RC]

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

[JB]
Perched on a windy hillside overlooking the Firth of Clyde and just 30 minutes’ drive from Glasgow is an unlikely place of artistic pilgrimage. In 1902 work began on the Hill House, a family home for a wealthy publisher and his family. The architect was Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Although the Hill House, which is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, is celebrated as Mackintosh’s domestic masterpiece, it was the result of a partnership – a collaboration between Charles and his wife Margaret, an accomplished artist in her own right. Just as Mackintosh’s reputation has grown in recent decades – his signature art nouveau designs can be found everywhere from prestigious museums to tea towels – so too has the recognition of Margaret’s talents, her influence on his designs and on their output as a team.

‘Margaret has genius; I have only talent’ – words attributed to Toshie as he was known, which underline how much he valued the woman who was his partner in life and in work. So, in today’s podcast, we’re putting Margaret in the spotlight. And doing so with the expertise of Dr Robyne Calvert, a cultural historian who’s written academic papers specifically dealing with Margaret’s legacy. Welcome to the podcast, Robyne.

[RC]
Thank you so much for having me.

[JB]
Now, Robyne, as a subject to research, you were first attracted to Margaret and not Charles. Why?

[RC]
Well, they sort of came as a package because you never see Margaret before you see Charles! Quite frankly, they were beautiful. I think sometimes when you study the history of art and design, you’re supposed to be very staid and must look at everything critically, but we forget that we come to these things at first because we find them beautiful. There’s something compelling about them. They look so strange and different. There was this element of fantasy about them that I was interested in; I just really wanted to know more. In particular, when I learned that she worked alongside Mackintosh and yet we don’t know much about her and for a long time her work was marginalised, I thought I wanted to really dig in further and look at how her contribution came in through the wider body of his work and the work of their wider community of friends.

[JB]
Let’s talk about Margaret; let’s begin with her early days. She wasn’t Scottish; she was born near Wolverhampton.

[RC]
Yes, she was born down in ‘the south’ and grew up down there, probably into her early 20s. We don’t actually know much about her early life unfortunately. We do know that she did study art with the headmaster of a school down there, and it’s thought that she probably did go and study abroad. She probably went to the Continent, but we again don’t know for sure. She was fluent in German and French – we know that. She seems to be incredibly well-read. But, there’s very little known about her early days, until she comes to Glasgow – and even then, we would love to know more.

[JB]
She was born in 1864, and we think her family came to Glasgow around 1890. She would have been about 26?

[RC]
I think actually perhaps even 1888, a little bit earlier than that. They came up here. She would already have had her education; of course, she was very close to her younger sister Frances, who was 9 years younger. The two of them began taking classes at the Glasgow School of Art, which in those days was housed in the Maclellan Gallery – not in the building yet. They were taking courses together as day students. And it seems from what we can tell from records they were studying more design courses. Margaret had definitely had artistic training before; Frances probably had some as well. They begin taking these classes together at the school.

[JB]
And then they set up shop together. They set up a business. Was this unusual for women?

[RC]
It was unusual for women but it’s not as unusual perhaps as we think it was. A couple of years ago, there was this great Modern Scottish Women exhibit at the National Galleries of Scotland – Alice Strang there did incredible research – and other projects too that have been looking at how women worked together in studios. A lot of times that information is really hidden because women would, for example, submit to art competitions not saying their full first names. They might have been M Macdonald. She didn’t … but as an example. There’s women submitting who may not have been known to be women. There were a lot of women who were working as artists and set up studios together or would have collaborative studio addresses.

[JB]
What was she selling, so to speak?

[RC]
They worked in multi-media. Again, there’s not a lot of work from the period but definitely they did watercolour work but they also did metalwork like repoussé. They’re these elongated watercolours that have these long metalwork frames. Each of them did two in the series. They would come up collaboratively with themes. They also did illustrated books; they worked on poster designs. It was a wide range of design work, some of which was for commercial commissions.

[JB]
How would you describe the style? This is very difficult to convey in a podcast and I think anyone listening could engage the help of Mr Google when we talk about specific works, but the style as described is Celtic imagery and folklore. It’s these elongated figures, generally, of women – very detailed.

[RC]
Yes, it definitely arises from this idea of Celtic imagery but also there’s a lot of Japanese influence in there. Japanese prints were something that were disseminated in the period; ultimately, the Mackintoshes had them in their own home. All of this rises out of aestheticism really – the wider design movement towards the end of the 19th century that was very interested in non-Western artistic influences. Not just Japanese; Chinese, Indian … really across the globe. Things that are coming into local museum collections. They’re very much like magpies. I think what they look at, in terms of style. But then they bring it into work in a really unique way. The figures do look very elongated. They look strange. At the time they were referred to as the Spook School, or the Ghoul School – the figures look like they were coming out of the graveyard, which is perhaps also what drew me to them originally! I’m a bit of an old goth!

[JB]
They were very different from what was around in the mainstream at the time. What did she look like? I read a description of her as ‘tall, stately, with commanding charm and majestic auburn hair.’ There’s a clipping of that hair in one of the museums – and it is beautiful, auburn hair. Do we know any more of how she looked, and about her character?

[RC]
Yes. There are some of these early descriptions of her as looking … in fact, there’s one description that describes her as looking ‘particularly English in her dress’ at an early party, which is interesting. Ultimately, she becomes part of this circle of friends at the Glasgow School of Art, and they did present themselves in a way that we might call ‘artistic’. They wore artistic dress, which means in the case of Glasgow they were wearing things that either they made themselves – more loosely fit clothing – or things that they embellished, added embroidery to, added these beautiful decorative collars to. They presented themselves in a way that signified ‘I’m an artist, actually; I work in artistic circles!’. Which is perhaps how we think of artists today. She was always described as being elegant and refined. Later on, there’s a great description of her painting in her grey, kid-skin gloves to protect her hands from the mineral spirit.

[JB]
She and Toshie (as he was known), they must have been a striking couple. How did they meet? He was almost 4 years younger.

[RC]
They met at Glasgow School of Art, probably introduced by Francis Newbery, the Director there at the time – as the story’s been told by Jessie Newbery (his wife). She was the Head of Embroidery at the school and also a good close friend of theirs. Basically, he saw kindred spirits within their work and within the kinds of things they were interested in. And of course, the fourth person we are missing so far is Herbert MacNair, who’s a friend of Mackintosh’s. The two men meet the two women, probably as part of some of the activities they were doing at the school: sketching clubs and activities that Newbery arranged. Apparently, he saw in them kindred spirits artistically, and so they met and they started working together.

[JB]
And that became the Glasgow Four.

[RC]
I think that’s a term that was applied a bit later on. They were referred to as The Four according to Jessie Newbery.

[JB]
Charles was at evening classes at the Art School. He was an architect draughtsman. His background was different from Margaret’s; he wasn’t so well educated. But the early stages of that relationship, that was complicated, wasn’t it? There was a lot of talk of a love triangle, because he was in a fairly serious relationship with his boss’s sister.

[RC]
Well, maybe!

[JB]
Oh! Tell more!

[RC]
This is an interesting one. There’s all these little mythologies that are fun to pick apart. It has been said – and again a lot of what we know is by people who have told the stories many, many years later to people. In the 1960s, people were running around interviewing the last people who knew Mackintosh, and they were getting quite old themselves. This story has to do with Mackintosh apparently having been engaged to Jessie Keppie, who was the sister of John Keppie, who was his boss then partner in the architectural firm he worked for: Honeyman, Keppie and Mackintosh ultimately. He was apparently engaged to Jessie and then he jilts her for Margaret once he meets Margaret – that’s the story that gets passed down.

Now, more recent scholarship has wondered about this, about the veracity of that – and also there’s just some details that we do know about their timeline where it doesn’t quite pan out. In particular, the friendship between Mackintosh and Jessie Keppie did seem to carry on. There’s a casket that he made for her that’s in the collection at the V&A that’s after this apparently happened. He does go on to continue to work with John Keppie. I guess it’s possible that you would make someone a partner in your firm and build great buildings with them after they jilted your sister … but it’s a little hard to imagine that that relationship wouldn’t have broken down if he left her heart-broken somehow.

Also, there’s this beautiful set of photographs that show this group of friends, mostly women, who were part of the sketching club at the art school, out in the countryside having a beautiful day out. In these photographs, Margaret and Jessie are arm in arm, and looking at each other in friendship. There’s no real solid documentation that they were ever engaged and that he dumps her. Perhaps they were dating? Maybe he took her for a coffee? Who knows! I think it is a story that has gotten blown out and also it’s frustrating from the perspective of trying to study women in art history because we gravitate to these stories of cat fights and love triangles, and whatever. When actually, why don’t we look at them as artists and their work? We don’t know the details of their personal lives really.

[JB]
By the late 1890s, they were beginning to exhibit together. How successful were they?

[RC]
They showed pieces at the 8th Vienna Secession Exhibition in Europe. That was, I think, really important for them. That exhibition was published widely in design magazines, but in particular at that exhibit they were there with Gustav Klimt, Hoffmann, another Vienna Secessionist who apparently saw them as a huge influence on their work. I think that gets under-played a little bit. They then go on to exhibit in Turin, in international modern art and design exhibitions essentially. There’s a few key design exhibitions that disseminate their work more widely. When they get published, they get a bit more well known. But it doesn’t necessarily result in a lot of work for them unfortunately.

[JB]
Is it fair to say that at that time Margaret was regarded just as highly as her husband?

[RC]
I think she was regarded just as highly in certain artistic circles, yes certainly. Their work was looked at as collaborative and I think importantly Mackintosh was very clear to credit her. That, to me, was really great for the time. When he sends off these lists of what the objects are that are going to be in exhibitions, he’s very clear to write who they all are by – because he’s collecting things from other people at Glasgow School of Art as well. The MacNairs exhibit as well. He’s very clear to delineate. In fact, for the Vienna Exhibition, there’s photographs of some of the works. The May Queen gets sent, and on the back of the photograph in his handwriting (these photographs incidentally are still here at the University of Glasgow) he says: Designed and executed by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. I think it’s really important because since those days, some scholarship has perhaps suggested that she didn’t actually design the work, that she just made it. She was a maker, like many of the other artisans that Mackintosh employed. There’s been some question marks that have been put over her contribution as an artist and designer herself. But he wrote it – so I don’t know how we can argue with that.

[JB]
As you say, they married in 1900 and that began a particularly intense and successful artistic period in their lives, which we will talk about in a moment. But first we’ll take a break, and when we come back we’ll discover what life had in store for this hitherto golden couple.

[MV]
Are you a whisky lover or a nature lover? A fan of Burns or a good ghost story? No matter what you love about Scotland, there’s an episode of Love Scotland just for you. Take a look through our archives to hear the in-depth stories behind Scotland’s history, people and places. Don’t forget to review, like and share.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast where we’re talking about the life and substantial talents of the artist Margaret Mackintosh. Robyne Calvert, I hadn’t realised how many of the headline Mackintosh works – and that’s Charles and Margaret’s – were completed in a very short window, just at the turn of the century.

[RC]
Yes, absolutely. At the end of the 19th century, The Four were working with each other – particularly the sisters were working in the studio together. When they get married – the MacNairs get married in 1899; the Mackintoshes in 1900 – from that point on, they only work with their spouses.

[JB]
That’s interesting, isn’t it?

[RC]
It is. And that period, particularly for the Mackintoshes, does become incredibly productive. It’s the golden period of Mackintosh’s work too – it’s right when the first phase of the Art School has opened; he’s working on all of these different commissions. And Margaret is involved in a great many of them.

[JB]
Let’s talk about the Hill House. It was commissioned, as I said in the introduction, and began in 1902. What is Margaret’s role in the Hill House?

[RC]
Like so many of the other works, it’s so hard to pick a part! I think that is actually one of the interesting things about looking at this. We often really want to lay attribution on particular works – this person did that, and this person did this … You want to credit it very clearly. But when you have these creative intimate collaborations, it’s hard to pick that apart a little bit. We do know very clearly, for example, she did this beautiful gesso panel that sits in the fireplace in the main White salon.

[JB]
Explain briefly what a gesso piece is.

[RC]
I’m very happy to do that. If you can imagine if you had a flat piece of plaster and then there was a drawing on it – perhaps maybe this is the best way of understanding it. We actually do have information from Agnes Blackie, one of the daughters of the Blackies who owned the house; she was the youngest daughter. She watched Margaret – this is the only place in fact that we have any idea of how Margaret worked – she said she watched Margaret working on that panel and ‘she piped the gesso on the surface like you decorate a cake’. It’s these very fine, beautiful lines. It is the same elongated figures. Earlier, I didn’t mention they were very influenced by the work of Aubrey Beardsley, who’s somebody who is also working in this style. These elongated sweeping lines and figures – and the one that’s at the Hill House is a …

[JB]
Is this the Sleeping Beauty?

[RC]
The Sleeping Beauty figure. This is a horizontal one and she’s lying reclined with her eyes closed. You do have all the roses on the surface, the same motifs that are repeated throughout the work and throughout the house.

[JB]
And the drawing room where you find this is comparatively minimalist, but it is a striking piece. Your eye is drawn to it as soon as you walk in the room.

[RC]
Absolutely. I think it’s a minimalist room in the sense of it being all white. They had an all-white room in their own home; you’ve got the White Dining Room at the Ingram Street tea room. It does appear to be unified in that composition. And then there’s all of these details – these pops of colour we would say today.

One of the other ones in that room that we know for sure was by Maragret are the antimacassars, which are the textiles that are on the back of the settee or sofa, and the chairs. If you don’t know, an antimacassar is because in the late 19th century men liked to do their hair up with macassar oil. If you have an oily head that rests on the back of your furniture, that’s not so nice for your upholstery!

[JB]
Every day’s a school day!

[RC]
You would make an antimacassar to put a textile on there to protect it. Now, I would never want anyone to put their oily head on one of Margaret’s beautiful textiles either! It’s a sit-up; don’t lean on it. But they are really beautiful, particularly the one that’s on the sofa. It’s so modern-looking; it’s pointing towards art deco. It’s almost gridded, with all these different colours, and there’s three sections to it. At the centre of each section, where you might expect to find a rose, it’s actually more like a yin-yang symbol. They’re really different.

[JB]
When visitors go to the Hill House, are they aware of Margaret’s influence specifically?

[RC]
That’s a good question. I would hope so, if only because the guides there are great. They like to let people know. I’m not sure if you were to walk in and you didn’t really know much about them at all, you might assume that everything in there is done by the same hand, because the styles overlap and are so different. I think that’s also why it’s difficult to piece out Margaret’s involvement. Some arguments have been made that we shouldn’t give her credit for places like the Hill House or the Willow Tea Room, or anything else, because she wasn’t an architect. In some ways that’s fair enough. No, she couldn’t have drawn up the plans and designs; she wasn’t a trained architect. But what we can’t quantify is the conversations that they had. He comes home from work, maybe shows some designs, she gives her input – we don’t know how that worked. That idea that her influence is felt somehow in the house, I guess, is the easiest way to describe it. But she did do some very significant pieces within the house, and within other of his work, that are definitely by her.

[JB]
Let’s talk about the tea rooms because they came to the attention of a tea room tycoon of the time: Miss Cranston. In Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, in the Willow Tea Room, there is the Willow Wood panel. Again, very difficult in a podcast – please at home look this up – try to describe that to me.

[RC]
Gosh. Well, it’s my personal favourite. It’s a long, rectangular composition. It has at the centre a large green oval that’s meant to represent a well. Here I should insert the theme of this panel is a set of sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the pre-Raphaelite poet, that are about souls revolving around a well in which a person looks into the well and sees the spirit of his lost love, perhaps dead, gone from him, rising up from the well. When you see the Willow Wood panel you see these three figures in it but it’s all very abstract. There is a face in the well that you can see; there’s a figure of a woman standing on the right; and then there’s another figure in the background. There’s a strange Egyptian-looking eye in the centre of it that’s dropping tears. If you were to read the poems, which I quite like to do when I go in there and make people listen to the poems! All of these motifs are in the poem themselves, but the overall effect of it is like this strange beaded curtain that is meant to stylistically represent these willow leaves, willow branches falling around this well. That theme plays out around the room in the stained glass and the repeats, but when you go in there you would never know it’s this romantic, quite tragic poem that is the theme of the room.

[JB]
It’s a dazzling work, and again I encourage anyone to go and see it because you truly get an idea of Margaret’s expertise. So, we had this incredibly intense and successful period in the early 20th century. But then, when we get to 1910-ish, Charles’s style starts to fall out of fashion in terms of his architectural work. Why?

[RC]
I think there’s a lot of complications that start to happen. In his personal life he doesn’t seem to be getting the kinds of commissions that he wants in Glasgow. I think to some extent that it is seen as a highly highly decorative style, and it wasn’t necessarily …

[JB]
It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, because there are pictures in the gallery of their house – this white minimalist room – and then the traditional Edwardian living rooms: cluttered, dark, ornate at the time. You can imagine that you had to be very different and have very different ideas to commission something.

[RC]
Yes, even their own close friend the critic Herman Muthesius made comments about that room, saying ‘it’s an aspirational ideal but embedded in that, it’s unliveable.’

[JB]
His work starts to fall out of favour; money is tight. They move south. Why is that?

[RC]
They go south because the work is drying up. I think they go originally not with any intention of leaving forever but it just transpires that way. They end up settling in Chelsea. Along the way, Mackintosh seems to switch a lot of his focus away from architectural work – I think because he wasn’t getting architectural commissions – towards design work. He starts producing amazing textile designs; so does Margaret, incidentally. These watercolours that he starts to do – he goes to the south of France to do his watercolours. Margaret travels with him initially but then she ends up staying in London because she has a heart condition and travelling becomes more difficult for her.

[JB]
We’ve leapt a bit now. They go to London 1913-ish, and then war obviously.

[RC]
I think that’s the biggest factor.

[JB]
Not a lot of commissions going round; there’s a different attitude. A huge paradigm shift. They move to the south of France. This is in 1923. Why did they go there?

[RC]
Margaret’s health isn’t quite as good any more, so they go to the south of France primarily for the climate. Their money can go a bit further. I think Mackintosh is also interested in developments in modern art. His style is shifting around this period. If we look at some of the commissions he did do, later commissions for example 78 Derngate down in the north of England, you look at that and it looks art deco. This is still several years before art deco becomes a thing. The same for Margaret too. There’s a few paintings from this period – they’re very weird, if I may, as much as I love. The palate becomes darker, in fact black; heavy black starts coming into it. In his watercolours, there’s a lot of outlining happening; the textile designs, the patterns – we’ve gone from that undulating curve to zigzag lines. It looks very jazz.

[JB]
That is a transition. There’s a quote from him, just when you were talking about money there, he says: ‘money, either paper or metal, slips through my hands in a way that would make a financier weep’. He was aware that that wasn’t perhaps part of his skill set. As you say, they were in France and there was a very important time. Margaret goes back to London for about 6 weeks and there’s not a lot of primary source material for us to find out what they were like as a couple, but here there is a collection of letters that he called the Chronicle. We only have the one-sided letters – these are from Charles to Margaret. What do they tell us about their relationship at that time?

[RC]
Those letters, I think, are some of the most beautiful parts talking about how close they must have been. The fact that he writes to her so frequently, and obviously she’s returning the letters. In some ways they’re just mundane accounts about his day – what he’d eaten, what he’d seen. He definitely makes some interesting and fun commentaries about people in it. But for me, one of the most important facts that we have about their relationship come out of these letters – this happens when he is obviously responding to a letter Margaret’s written him in which she’s going to have to go to an interview with an architectural critic and journalist about his work. Of course, not having her letter, we don’t know what she has said to him but perhaps she has expressed some kind of anxiety, like ‘I’m not sure really what to say to this guy’. This is where Charles writes back to Margaret and says: ‘just remember you are half if not three-quarters in all of my architectural work’. So, a bit unlike that ‘Margaret has genius, I have talent’ comment; that’s a second-hand one. This is directly from his hand. He is saying to her and reassuring her; ‘you are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work’. Not just the other stuff they did. In his mind, she’s a huge part of everything he’s done. Again, how that worked we don’t know, but he seemed to think she was incredibly important.

[JB]
From the letters, they are still very deeply in love. This is 25 years or so into their marriage, and Charles seems almost needy. He’s really, really missing her. He was still painting; she had given up creating art in the early 1920s. Do we know why?

[RC]
No, we don’t. I wonder to what extent she’d really given up. Some of her late works are from 1921/22, but my favourite work by her is a painting called La mort parfumee, which is in the collection. Go Google that. Perfumed death. It is the most rich … Egyptian influence that looks like a ritual. It’s this black canvas that’s absolutely exquisite. Here’s a painting that comes at what seems to be towards the end of her artistic career which is perhaps the best that she’s ever been. When she ultimately dies, things are destroyed.

[JB]
What happens: Charles dies first. He dies of tongue cancer in 1928. He was only 60. Margaret died in 1933, and their possessions – I read that they were valued at £88, 12s and 2d, including £1 for 4 of Charles’s chairs. His designed chairs.

[RC]
Yeah, it’s shocking and heart-breaking when you look at it that way. And for whatever reasons, the contents of her studio and her home were mostly destroyed. They were just got rid of. What letters, sketches, diaries etc – who knows what was gone.

[JB]
But in the years that followed, friends worked very hard to reestablish Charles’s reputation. Why not Margaret? Why did we lose all of her archive?

[RC]
Modernism! Modernism! There was a 1933 memorial exhibition that was put on by their friend Davidson who at this point had purchased the home that they had made here in Glasgow, and there was an architectural critic that wrote to him. I should just clarify this was never published publicly; this was a private letter, but scholarship has brought this out many times since then. He basically says to him, ‘I hope you’re not planning to give Margaret any sort of attention in this memorial exhibition. Some of Mackintosh’s work had her unfortunate feminine influence’. It is literally ‘feminine’ the word that is used. At this point, art nouveau as a style has fallen very much out of favour. It was seen to be, retrospectively, as overly feminine and we’re now in the period of the rise of the Bauhaus and modern architecture.

As you mentioned, the war in between had a huge impact on design economy really. You weren’t going to be making things that were overly done and overly blown. However, we are also in the period now of art deco. There’s a lot of different things going on there, but particularly in relationship to Mackintosh there were some critics who just thought ‘oh, they weren’t as good’. When I say ‘they’, by the way, MacNair’s in there too. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, he’s the one who had the vision and the X-ray specs into the future, who could see the direction of modern design better than the rest of them could, which is a complete over-simplification. Probably gives Mackintosh too much credit, quite frankly. I think there’s a lot of talk about him seeing the future of design, but actually he was very much a contemporary in the way he was working.

[JB]
At the end of the day, in terms of Margaret’s overall success and her reputation – and you’re the expert; I’ve just dipped my toe in this – could I offer (and this is probably heresy) that although she was mightily talented, she maybe was not as ambitious? She was a collaborator, as evidenced by her work with her sister; she was happiest as part of a team. And then with her husband. Does that hold water or is that just heresy? You can tell me!

[RC]
I will tell you! I think it does hold water, Jackie. I think as much as I am Team Margaret and have been for almost two decades, it just seems like that is perhaps the case. She wasn’t submitting to every single competition or exhibition; she didn’t have a prolific output. Some of her best work does seem to arise from Mackintosh’s commissions; they’re part of those commissions. I think she was quite content to be working in that way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not to say she didn’t exhibit internationally. Beyond what I’ve mentioned, she did exhibit in Chicago; there were shows in Russia; and she exhibited on her own at watercolour and Arts & Crafts societies, etc. She did do that but she wasn’t nearly as ambitious and prolific as someone like Jessie M King – just to throw another Glasgow name in there. It seems like she was quite content to live that life.

When they went down to ultimately settle in Chelsea, they are in a really rich artistic community down there. They’re friends with Margaret Morris the dancer and they’re on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Set. Although clearly money wasn’t a strong point there, it seems like they were at least living a happy life together. There is a really beautiful quote by one of their friends that says: ‘Margaret and Toshie were hand in glove the entirety of their lives.’ I’m paraphrasing but the entirety of their lives – it is a really beautiful love story if it doesn’t necessarily have the successful happy ending that we would all want for them.

[JB]
I think that’s a happy enough ending. Robyne, thank you so much for your expertise. I thoroughly enjoyed that; thank you.

[RC]
Thank you so much. It was wonderful to chat with you about this.

[JB]
If you’d like to see some more of Margaret’s work for yourself, you can take a trip to the Hill House in Helensburgh. I think it’s only when you see the designs close up that you’re struck by the detail and by how subtle, but paradoxically how striking they are, that you appreciate Margaret’s talent. As you know, crucial conservation work by the National Trust for Scotland to protect the house continues. The chainmail box, which has become an attraction in its own right, has been protecting the building and it’s now dryer than it’s been for decades, which is a great step forward. Experts have been busy carrying out sampling and analysis at the Hill House to help decide what to do next. Keep an eye on nts.org.uk for more information. I would like to think that Margaret and Toshie would have approved of the innovation.

But that’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Caroline Hirst [CH]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland.

[JB]
I wish my words could do justice to the beauty of my surroundings right now. I’m in the walled garden of Kellie Castle, near Pittenweem in Fife. The glorious late summer colour of the garden is overlooked by the baronial splendour of the castle itself. It’s a scene of deep peace, untroubled by contemporary life. In fact, I could have time-travelled to a date any time over the past few hundred years and my surroundings would be just about the same. And that is the wonderful consequence of protecting our heritage. We know what people built and how they lived because it’s still there to experience.

But just as our fortunes ebb and flow, so do those of buildings. Not so very long ago, this castle was a crumble away from ruin and its ultimate downfall. However, salvation was at hand, not in the shape of the National Trust for Scotland – that part of the story comes later – but at the hands of a remarkable multi-talented family who poured so much time, money and love into this place that they pretty much willed it back to life.

I’m now inside Kellie in a small room high up in the north-west tower, whose base dates back to the 14th century. If you can hear any squeaking in the distance, I’m told we’ve got some bats behind the panelling. Well, I’m not alone. Joining me is Caroline Hirst, the property manager here, who like me has fallen under the spell of Kellie and its history. Welcome to the podcast, Caroline.

[CH]
Thank you, it’s a real pleasure.

[JB]
I’m very glad you’re here, not least because of the bats! I am daunted by the scope of Kellie’s story. Give me a whistle-stop tour of the earliest origins and let’s say you stop around the mid-1800s.

[CH]
The first known mention of Kellie Castle is around about 1150 in a charter. Then, the Seward family who came up from Northumberland, had it for a number of years. The oldest part of the castle as it stands today dates to 1360 – that is the north-west tower, as we are here today. Basically, that was the first 3 floors of that tower. It was the Oliphant clan or family who had this area; it was purely for defensive reasons. They subsequently had Kellie for 250 years and developed Kellie as it stands today. It really is a remarkable building.
Between around 1573, when the east tower was built separate to the north-west tower; then they created the south-west tower between 1592 and 1606, and added all towers together by the central part, creating almost like a mansion house rather than a defensive castle as we think of a castle. That was subsequently sold to the Erskine family, who are still very much a local family in Fife. They had it for 10 generations before there wasn’t an heir available to take it on. It was then passed to the Earls of Mar and Kellie through a dispute that was held over the title and the lands. Sadly, it was then left, basically, to rack and ruin.

[JB]
How bad was it?

[CH]
The Lorimers first stumbled across it in the 1870s. Professor James Lorimer, who we’ll be hearing about shortly, he had chronic asthma and he used to come up every summer from Edinburgh. He was a professor of public law at Edinburgh University. They would come up to gain the sea air, to make him feel a lot better. They were looking for a friend for somewhere to rent in the area and they stumbled across this farm track. There are records of them coming up through the old gates up to the castle. They came across this semi-ruinous castle with the roof slightly falling in; there weren’t any windows intact. They decided to have a picnic and explore. There are records of them going round, saying ‘wow, this is incredible!’ It almost looked like something they couldn’t take on, and they were still thinking of their friend at that point.
It wasn’t until they went home and started to really think about Kellie, that they thought ‘We could make this possible’. Hence, they contacted the Earl of Mar and Kellie and had an agreement drawn up for 38 years as what they call an ‘improver tenant’. The Earl of Mar and Kellie made it wind- and water-tight, and they paid a very small sum of £25 a year to basically make this possible as a summer residence. They obviously then spent a lot of time using local craftsmen.

[JB]
Before we do that though, I think we’re under-playing the state of it. I found some memoirs of Louise, one of the daughters of James Lorimer, who said that neighbouring landowners thought they were daft for taking it on. She wrote that ‘there were great holes letting the rain and snow through the roofs; many of the floors had become unsafe; every pane of glass was broken; swallows built in the coronets on the ceilings while the ceilings themselves sagged and in some cases fell into the rooms.’ It was a project!

[CH]
It was a project, and I think that’s why at first they were thought a bit crazy to take it on. But as they thought about it, what was important about Kellie and why they made this big decision is that this property had been almost lost in a time capsule. Like a lot of properties in Scotland like this, they would often have had in the Victorian era quite a big change of interiors. What you have at Kellie is a time capsule right the way back to the 14th century to a degree in the north-west tower, and then to the 16th and 17th centuries – just sat waiting to be restored.

[JB]
Although it was in a terrible state of disrepair, it had dodged a bullet. Because the Victorians were quite keen on coming in and saying ‘let’s gut this place’ in a kind of 1960s/70s way.

[CH]
That’s right. All the previous decoration had been lost at that point. That’s why Kellie was so significant. They realised that. They were a highly educated family, highly creative and they knew what Kellie represented.

[JB]
Tell me about the family themselves.

[CH]
Professor James Lorimer was a Professor of Public Law at the University of Edinburgh, a very well-educated gentleman. He had first met his wife Hannah coming across on a boat from Leith to Fife. She was extremely seasick, and she was a lot younger; she was 16 at the time and he was 32. Unknown to him, four years later they would be married. It was a true love match; they were truly in love with one another. She was a real beauty and they had 6 children.
All of the children were influenced by their parents’ artistic interests. Certainly the 6 children, apart from James who was the eldest and became a merchant and travelled extensively – and finally died sadly in his early 40s in South Africa – the other 5 children were influenced, boys and girls. They all had the opportunities to develop their skills. Even the girls go to Edinburgh University.

[JB]
Let’s nail some dates here. It’s 1878 eventually and that’s the night the family first moved in here. And it’s still terrible, and you can see the stars through the roof! It wasn’t habitable in winter, so they came here in the summer, but then Kellie began to work its magic. When James Lorimer, the father, decided to start the renovation, he could have just got a whole load of workmen in and say ‘just do what you have to do’. But no. He decided to do it authentically and get artisans, I suppose is the best word.

[CH]
Very much in that Arts & Crafts ethos. We know about William Morris down in England and the Arts & Crafts movement down below the Scottish Border into England. What they were doing up here was a movement in a similar sense and time. Using local craftsmen and local materials – that is what is so important at Kellie Castle. They were using a local architect in Elie to come up and help them; also local plasterworkers from Pittenweem to come and copy some of the plasterwork that was already there and create copies of moulds. The Vine Room, if anybody’s been in there, you can see part of the relief isn’t quite as deep. That is exactly what they copied from what was already there. It showed real skill.

[JB]
We’re going to talk a lot about the influence of Kellie and the influence of those craftsmen on the children and what they did later in their careers. But before we do that, I’d like to talk about Hannah, their mother – this beautiful young woman who eventually knocked out 6 children in 12 years. She was pretty busy. Women are so often air-brushed from history because of the social confines of the time, but she was artistic. She was a gifted painter; she had all those children, but she was a driving force. She knew she wanted her children to achieve.

[CH]
Yes. Certainly, she would set little projects for the children in art, drawing, needlework, to the point where Hannah would even start doing plaster casts. She spent time with the plasterworkers learning how to do …

[JB]
This is young Hannah, the daughter?

[CH]
Young Hannah. The girls were given equal opportunities to the boys. As I say, they all went to Edinburgh University to study. I look to Professor James Lorimer, because the father was a very modern-thinking man. He was not a man of his time where girls should be married off, have children and be home-makers. He was very much of the thought that girls should have equal opportunities like the sons.

[JB]
They were so unusual for their time because whenever Hannah and her three daughters went to Edinburgh, they attended classes in Greek, French, German, philosophy, Bible studies and geology. Women weren’t allowed to graduate but you can imagine what someone like Hannah the mother could have achieved but for restrictions of the day.

[CH]
But luckily, they had those opportunities. Those opportunities and that experience that she had in the creative arts then followed on to create such a phenomenal dynasty.

[JB]
As we’re at the top of the castle, which was a hideaway artist’s studio, let’s talk about one of the sons first of all: John Henry, who was the third Lorimer child. He was born in 1856. Photographs of him, Caroline, show a sort of intense, slightly shy man? What was he like?

[CH]
He was a quiet man. There’s actually a picture just to the side of us while we’re sat here, sat with his dog Burley. He was quite a tall gentleman. He retired after his mother’s death in 1916 to Kellie, staying here on his own until his death in 1936. He was quite happy on his own – he was a bachelor; he had never married.

[JB]
He painted his first watercolour at 8. I don’t know what I was doing at 8, but I wasn’t painting watercolours! His first oil painting 3 years later, so he had a prodigious talent.

[CH]
Incredible! By his 40s, he had property in London, Edinburgh – albeit he always came back to his beloved Kellie Castle. He had first gone down to do portraiture – that’s where the money was, in a sense. That’s how he gained his small fortune. He did 130 portraits in his career.

[JB]
But he didn’t like doing it?

[CH]
He didn’t and he always retreated back to what I would call genre paintings.

[JB]
He wrote to his sister when he was in London and said, ‘The only hope for me is when I am free from the genre of portraiture.’ He said that he wanted to tell stories. Although his portraiture, I think – and you know far better than me – doesn’t just show likeness but shows character. So, he is achieving that.

[CH]
His portrait paintings … if you go into the John Henry Gallery here, if anybody comes to visit, you look at his mother and father – beautiful, sat side by side. It’s almost as if they’re life size; it’s almost as if they could get up from where they’re seated and walk out into the room and greet you. He really captures character and personality. In the one of his younger sister Janet Alice, he creates something that is almost like Singer Sargent, it has this feeling where he captures in paint the feeling, the satin. He’s influenced by so many people, even down to the Dutch painters and Vermeer. This idea of capturing light that is quite incredible in his paintings, even of his interiors.

[JB]
Do you know what’s incredible? It’s that we are sitting here in the studio where he created. The castle itself, for anyone who’s interested in art, the walls are laden with John Henry’s work.

[CH]
This new publication has come out recently – Reflections – and it really captures chapter by chapter the idea of home, family; the idea of a spirit of place that Kellie represents. It’s not just a property; it has a being in essence that has worked through all of the Lorimer family.

[JB]
You say he never married. Can you talk to me about one particular painting, which absolutely captivated me: The 11th Hour. It’s here.

[CH]
The 11th Hour has finally come home, just in this past year. Very kindly, the Lorimer family have gifted it to the National Trust for Scotland. The painting is quite incredible. It’s very atmospheric; it’s actually influenced by the room it’s now hanging in – that’s the Vine Room. It shows a woman sat just prior to, or just after (it could be either), her marriage day. She’s sat there looking really quite forlorn.

[JB]
It’s the saddest wedding picture I’ve ever seen.

[CH]
It is. There is a discussion that it was also known as Marriage of Convenience. There’s also a discussion that it could represent sisters that had to depart Kellie.

[JB]
Because two of them did, didn’t they?

[CH]
When they married, both Hannah and Janet Alice actually left the property to marry and move abroad. Sadly, this could represent, as in the painting The Flight of the Swallows, it shows the sadness of people leaving Kellie Castle. They did return, but it was the feeling that the family was being changed. They were so close.

[JB]
The story I most like is the story that it could potentially be John Henry’s lost love.

[CH]
It could be! There are various stories about a lady called Harriet that he was madly in love with. Unfortunately, her family were not happy about the match because he was seen as somebody that wasn’t financially stable in his profession as a painter. There could be reasons … He maybe met his true love but he never had the opportunity to settle down with her.

[JB]
It is a poignant piece.

[CH]
There could be all sorts of reasons.

[JB]
He does seem a sad man but, as you say, perhaps happy in his own company. He took over the lease here in 1916 when his mother died, as you said. His paintings sort of went out of fashion and he lived here at his beloved Kellie until old age forced him to move.

[CH]
He also had a property down in Pittenweem called The Gyles that he would retreat to when he got particularly cold at Kellie. And I can tell you, it does get very, very cold! Without any central heating. As he was here on his own, maybe he wouldn’t have had servants to light fires. As a bachelor, I think he probably retreated down to Pittenweem in the worst months.
They do say that he used to wander round in a long, black coat with hot water bottles fastened to the front with a bit of string, to keep himself warm. He must have been quite a vision because he was a tall, quite well-made gentleman. I think in the end, I feel he was almost married to Kellie; it became his muse in a way.

[JB]
How lovely.

[CH]
I can understand, as somebody who spends a lot of time here. It has a personality, this place. It has a spirit which becomes part of you and becomes almost like a friend.

[JB]
Well, on that note let’s take a short break from the considerable talents of the Lorimers. But don’t worry – when we come back, we’ve got more!

[MV]
Scotland’s history? Think battlefields; think castles; think great glens and historic homes. But think tenements too, and townhouses and doocots, mills and humble cottages. The National Trust for Scotland works hard all year round to safeguard the stories of all sorts of Scots for future generations to enjoy. They do it for the love of Scotland, and you can play your part too. Just head to nts.org.uk/donate

[JB]
Welcome back to the podcast I suppose we should be calling ‘The Lorimers have got talent’ because they have it by the bucket load. Before the break, Caroline, we talked about John Henry, the third Lorimer – keep me right here. His older sister Hannah, she was another incredibly creative member of the family.

[CH]
She was so talented in so many ways. She could be an artist, she could carve, she …

[JB]
Her sculptures are in one of the bedrooms – beautiful!

[CH]
The Blue Room. The Mother and Child, which sits above the Lorimer cradle – she captured again the feeling of basically the human spirit very much in all her artwork. She was so taken by the work of the craftsmen that worked here, to the point where she even spent time with them almost like an apprentice, learning how to create the moulds of the plasterwork. She even went on to take on commissions and actually undertake work elsewhere. When she married Everard im Thurn, she was very accomplished at creating watercolours, botanical drawings namely, in this case orchids. They are now kept in the botanical collections at Kew Garden. They’re so notable and beautifully created.

[JB]
Once again, although you say a forward-thinking family, you wonder what the girls could have achieved if they had been born in another time.

[CH]
I think Hannah probably could have achieved anything she wanted. But I think she ultimately decided to become a wife. I think she could have become very, very successful in her own right, and there is this discussion with scholars now about why didn’t she. But she made that decision. She fell in love with this gentleman who was quite a bit older than her, and it was very sad for her to leave Kellie, especially when she was so close to John Henry. It was her ultimate decision. She was a really strong character. She was known as Lorrie – that was her nickname – and she was quite a driving force throughout especially John Henry’s career.

[JB]
But she was a woman of her time, wasn’t she? It’s easy for us to put our own values on her – why didn’t you become a sculptor? It was very difficult because, in terms of her station in life, it wasn’t expected of her to do something like that.

[CH]
That’s right.

[JB]
This is the family you do not want to live next door to if you have kids of your own, do you?! We’re moving on now to another child – this is the youngest one: Robert. When I was researching this, I really got the feeling that he was the child who was most influenced by growing up here because he was an impressionable 14-year-old when the family took on Kellie. By all accounts, it had a profound effect on him.

[CH]
Yes. Robert became an architect. But he was more than an architect; he was a designer. What he created was quite incredible.

[JB]
If John Henry was quiet and had an air of sadness, Robert not so much!

[CH]
He was much more forward-going, as you would say. He was outgoing, he knew how to develop himself, how to present himself, how to make the best of every situation. Quite the complete opposite, maybe, of John Henry, who was more retiring. Robert was very good at selling himself and what he was capable of achieving, certainly.

[JB]
He became an architect and he not only designed buildings, but he designed the furniture.

[CH]
He did interiors. If you look, for instance, at Hill of Tarvit Mansionhouse, it’s literally just a stone’s throw from Kellie, 20 minutes, near Cupar. He created the design of the building for the Sharp family, the interiors to actually help house the collections that the Sharp family collected …

[JB]
Don’t say too much about Hill of Tarvit because there’s an entire podcast coming soon! Spoiler alert! But also here, the rooms are full of his distinctive furniture. He was a hugely influential architect. He was remembered by people he worked with as ‘a frugal man who resented buying coal for his architect’s office’. You could say that, but because I know what Kellie was like, and because you’ve explained the fact that they didn’t really bother about heating and they were quite a bohemian family, that might not have been the fact that he was mean, but it was what he was used to!

[CH]
That’s it. When they first all moved in as children, they were literally all staying on the east tower – that was the only part that was habitable. Imagine! There was a little letter written by one of the children about how they woke up one morning and there was ice on the windows, and they had to scratch away the ice to look at the sun coming over the Firth of Forth. It’s quite incredible. They would have literally just put on a tweed shawl – wrap yourself up, keep warm, keep active – and that was the mindset of living in a property like this. Anyone who lives in an old house, it gets particularly cold, and you learn to adapt to it.

[JB]
Absolutely, we were far more stoical in those days. Something that you intimated: he knew how to sell himself. He was not short of a bit of ego. He is famous for, among other things, the magnificent Thistle Chapel in Edinburgh’s St Giles’s Cathedral. That tells you the level of the work he was doing. But he wasn’t the most diplomatic. Again, one of his staff wrote that he told a client ‘This house will be remembered because I designed it, not because you paid for it!’

[CH]
Oh, he had self-confidence! That’s for sure. The interesting thing is – there’s a lovely photograph of him in the Earl’s Room. We’ve created a little room – the Robert Lorimer study – just to show you some of his work and some of his designs relating to some of his furniture and his draughtsmanship. The drawings of the Vine Room ceiling done while he was staying here growing up are quite superb – the elevations of Kellie. What he always comes back to in a lot of his work, you’ll notice in his architectural designs, is that he’s highly influenced by the architecture of Kellie.

[JB]
Once again, it permeates them all, doesn’t it?

[CH]
It always comes through. Even though he was this man who was very good at selling himself, he still had his roots at Kellie. Kellie was again, in a way, a muse for him in his designs.

[JB]
My favourite Robert Lorimer – I think you know what I’m going to say – is the National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle. If you haven’t been, anyone listening to this, it’s such a serene but reverential building. That should be a podcast in itself. The controversies though surrounding that – because it took a long time to be designed and built – that must have taken up a great deal of his life?

[CH]
It must have done. What an honour to have been given that task of creating that. That’s going to be here for generations to come. He was ultimately knighted for his work, so obviously that time and the issues he maybe faced were all worth it because he became Sir Robert Lorimer as a result of his work.

[JB]
But indirectly, Robert was responsible for Kellie’s salvation once again, through his son. Tell me about that.

[CH]
Yes. When John Henry died in 1936, obviously Kellie was left again to itself. It was coming up towards the Second World War. Hew Lorimer and his wife Mary – Hew being the son of Robert Lorimer – were living in Edinburgh at the time. There was a feeling that it was not safe to be staying in Edinburgh, so they moved actually up to The Gyles firstly in Pittenweem, to stay where John Henry had spent his winters. Mines had come in from the sea at The Gyles and had exploded – it had made quite an impact on the property. Hence, they decided to come back up to Kellie. They renewed the lease and came to a property that needed quite a lot of work doing once again. Mary was quite incredible. She had the true spirit of the Lorimers within her. To say she had married a Lorimer, she was very much of the ‘Mend and Make Do’ mentality of the time.

[JB]
Hew was a sculptor and they met at art school?

[CH]
They’d fallen deeply in love. When they first came to Kellie, they had children all, I think, below the age of 3. They had three children: Robin, Monica and Henry. All those children had rooms in the south-west tower, but their mother was quite a driving force in bringing that spirit of Kellie back to life, using found objects, going round the local auctions. They said she used to go round all the auctions in a little pony and trap, finding anything that was interesting for the castle to start to furnish it again, until they could bring furnishings up from Edinburgh.

[JB]
Eventually though, it became even too much for Hew, after Mary died.

[CH]
Once Mary died, sadly he made the ultimate decision. Although they had actually been able to buy the castle from the Earl of Mar & Kellie offering it for sale to them, they made the purchase from them. But sadly, a number of years later, after Mary had died, Hew Lorimer decided in 1970 … he already had a link to the National Trust for Scotland, which had been formed in 1931 … he decided the ideal thing would be to sell it to the National Trust for Scotland. He knew what an important property this was and what was included within it and the story it told.
So, it was sold in 1970 but the lovely thing is he stayed on as the property manager, living in the east tower until his older age. He was able to tell that story to the visitor; that continuity was there. Still keeping his workshop, which we still have to this day in the Stables area.

[JB]
A fabulous exhibition of his work.

[CH]
Incredible. We’ve kept a room of his work just off the shop area as well. Sadly, he then had to go to a nursing home in St Andrews prior to his death. Subsequently, we’ve had property managers – also known as Visitor Services Managers over time – that have kept that story alive. I think there’s very few people who’ve done my job who haven’t been touched by the place. As I say, it becomes quite a true friend; it’s more than a property. It’s very difficult to lock up at night, but it’s always good to come in and say good morning! You always feel when you come in of the morning that it’s something you have to say hello to!

[JB]
What I particularly like, and I’m sure visitors will sense this too, with the furniture, the paintings, the combined talents of the Lorimers, even the family members we haven’t managed to discuss, they’re all still within these walls, as you say. It isn’t a cold series of exhibits that were purchased down the years; it’s a family history.

[CH]
It is. And the friendship with the Lorimers has been maintained. I’ve been friends with them for many years. It’s wonderful to keep that relationship going. The Lorimer Society is still very much a strong part of what we do. Robin and Monica are still alive, Hew’s children. They still come back, and they tell the story of what it was actually like staying here as a child. It wasn’t quite as romantic sometimes as you would imagine. It would have been tough. When Hew and Mary came back during that Second World War period, there was no electricity; there was barely running water.

[JB]
What an adventure playground. I’m sure you won’t mind me sharing this, but you believe that you are not alone in this castle.

[CH]
No. People are going to think me a bit … as soon as you talk about the word ghosts, it conjures up this idea that someone’s a bit wacky. There is a presence here. That’s what I will describe – there’s a presence, there’s a feeling that you’re being watched. Again, somebody might say that sounds a bit creepy. It’s not. It’s a feeling that whoever it is – it may be more than one, it could be the whole family – are wanting you to be here. They’re watching you but they’re happy that the story’s continuing.

[JB]
You think it’s John Henry, don’t you?

[CH]
I think it’s John Henry Lorimer that I feel; certainly, I feel a male presence that is still wandering around. I sometimes feel I’m going to bump into him. I know when I came back after furlough, after Covid, I was the only one that was working here for that entire winter of 2020. I was up in the library looking at one of the paintings, to put some tissue over it to cover it, just to protect it. And there was certainly a presence of somebody walking behind on the floorboards, as if to say ‘yes, you’re doing the right thing’. I just gently walked round the edge of the room and out. I know that sounds quite a strange thing, but it’s having this feeling that you understand what has been before. And a property that dates back to 1360, the characters that have lived here, there cannot NOT be an energy left of some sort, whether you believe in ghosts or not. There must be some energy of the past, the people, the spirits that have lived here, and I think that’s what gives this spirit of place that Kellie imbues.

[JB]
Absolutely. What a story, Caroline. Thank you for sharing it with us, and well done to the Lorimers who were doing what the National Trust for Scotland does long before it was even a twinkle in John Stirling Maxwell’s eye.
If you’d like to visit Kellie Castle, and maybe even John Henry, you’ll find details on the National Trust for Scotland web pages. Entrance is by guided tour. Please check before you come to make sure the castle is open. That’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. Until next time, goodbye.

[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.

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]
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[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.