Trust pays tribute to Culloden champion

Transcript

[Katey Boal]
Hello and welcome to a conversation with Derek Alexander, our Head of Archaeology here at the National Trust for Scotland, and Professor Christopher Duffy, an imminent historian and author of the seminal work: The '45 on, well, Culloden!
And we're really excited that you guys can join us and I think the exciting thing today is that we're going to talk a little bit about some work that's been happening, particularly some archaeology and a rethinking, in many ways, of the narrative around the battle and effectively where people were and what they were doing.
So I thought it would make the most sense for us to start with Derek, and if you can tell us a little bit about some of the work that's happened this year actually on the battlefield itself.

[Derek Alexander]
Yeah, ok. So this year, it was actually at the end of September / start of October, we did some archaeological fieldwork at Culloden. Basically, one of the areas that we wanted to look at was a field which is sort of behind the government deployment line, probably on their left flank, the left wing of where the infantry were deployed. And it's roughly in the area where, if you drive in to the Culloden visitor centre, it's on the left-hand side before you get to the car park. It's a field that sometimes gets used for events. It might get used in the future for overflow car parking, that sort of thing.

So it's never really been looked at from an archaeological point of view, so we wanted to do some work on the site because there's not been an awful lot done on the periphery around the margins of the battlefield itself. And we also wanted to take the opportunity to work with the ground staff and the rest of the staff at Culloden, to give them an idea of what archaeological fieldwork was like and what sort of opportunities for involving the public might be in the future.

So we chose a week in October, probably not the best time of year to do archaeological fieldwork but actually it wasn't too bad. There was one windy day when our gazebo became a casualty and it blew away! But apart from that, we had about 30 people over the course of the week, excavating test pits. That's essentially a small area, about a metre square each, and we spaced them out 5 metres apart, in a sort of grid 2 lines apart, almost like a unit of infantry, all nicely placed apart, and taking up probably about the full length of something like 80 metres altogether.

What we did was we took off the top soil. We sieved and excavated down through the top soil down to the subsoil below and recorded anything that was in it. All the soil's been mixed up over the years by ploughing, so it's not like we're going to be disturbing things. It's really a sampling strategy. It's not the most intensive way to do things but it can be a way that you can find objects that are not metal objects, so it gives you an idea of the types of things that you might find on the site.

So we did a week doing that, and really it's in the sort of area where we think, as I said at the start, where we probably think the left wing of the government troops, probably the second line of deployment, or maybe even the third line of deployment according to Christopher's maps. It's there or thereabouts. Probably somewhere close to where Ligonier's battalion was lined up at the start of the battle, and they may well have moved forward at some point to support Barrel's regiment to the front once the Jacobites collide with them.

We also did metal detecting, and that's a standard approach to archaeological investigation of battlefield sites. So, one of the members of staff at Culloden is a very good metal detectorist, and we had our own archaeological team with their metal detectors and we did a grid in the field. And that probably proved the most useful, like most of these things. The survival of metal artefacts is generally what marks the sort of deployment and engagement areas of battlefields in general, if you're doing archaeology. So this had never been done before in the area and we weren't sure what we were going to get.

It was really very much: let's have a look and see! And one of the things we got, one or two metal artefacts. We got a couple of iron horseshoes -- one of them's quite big actually, so it may be from an agricultural horse. And of course, this is the thing. It's difficult to tell all the time whether the objects you're finding are just things that are in the fields because people have been living and farming there for hundreds of years anyway, or whether it's related to that hour of engagement at the time of the battle. But of course the battle itself, we know how long that lasted but there was the sort of run-up to it beforehand. And obviously there would have been a certain amount of government troops hanging about on the site afterwards, looking after casualties, burying the dead, before moving on to Inverness; and there may well have been a unit left on the site, just to clear up anyway.

As well as the horseshoes, we got a number of little buckles, a piece of metal plate that could be some sort of copper -- difficult to see, some sort of copper alloy fitting -- but probably the two nicest finds were two musket balls, one of which had an impact scar. Not a great impact scar, it hadn't hit anything with any force, but the weight and the size of them suggest, I think, more that they're likely to be Jacobite-sized musket balls from some of the French muskets because they're slightly smaller. I need to get them checked to be sure, but it could well be. There's not an awful lot in the field; we didn't get hundreds of these sort of things. And when previously Tony Pollard had done work before in the Field of the English, there was literally hundreds of these things on the ground. So it's likely that you're getting a sort of filtering effect, and what's filtering them is in fact the front two lines of government troops. They are actually absorbing a lot of the musket fire and it's hitting there and falling down, or it's not getting through because it's getting stopped by solid bodies. But some of them are going to go over; some of them are going to go under, so you'll get a scatter of missed shots, I suppose, at the back.

So from our point of view, that's quite interesting because it's not a bit that we've looked at before and I think the idea will be, in the future, to look at other bits of the battlefield to try and get an idea of the density of scatter of remains. Now we've only done an initial survey of this area; we could go back and do more. We can go back and open up bigger areas and see whether that gets confirmed. So this is the first chance that we've had to do any battlefield archaeology on the site for quite some time.

The other thing we did find, we found one or two bits of pottery and things, the usual sort of thing. We found a fragment of a clay pipe, a clay tobacco pipe. And what was intriguing about that was it had the word London stamped onto the bowl of it, and that got me quite excited! I had this image of some soldier from London in a red coat, smoking his pipe or something on the way. But I sent it down to the guys, well a photograph, to the guys in the Museum of London just to see if they had any similar ones. And I think they're probably right, they said it's of a type from the stamp that probably is more likely to be 19th century. It's more likely to be somebody visiting the site at a later date, and of course it was found right beside the road, quite close to where the old road was running across the moor.

[Katey]
Still that's ... I was going to say, still that's an interesting thing because that has a tendency to tell a little bit about the tourism industry in and around, and the people moving up and down. And one of the things I wanted to interject that is really interesting, you were mentioning the musket balls and you said that you could tell that they were Jacobite musket balls. And for those people who are listening in, who are saying: how would you know that they're Jacobite or not Jacobite? I think what we need to clarify is the fact that the size and weight of the musket balls that come out of the French muskets, which we know the Jacobites had, are different than what the government soldiers have, and this is actually -- I wouldn't call it luck -- but it's an incredible tool in terms of looking at the archaeological evidence because you can look at a musket ball and you can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that it's likely that this musket ball came from the Jacobite side or the government side.

[Derek]
Yes, so size is important. I can never remember the actual size but it's like 16mm to 17mm. There's millimetres in it, isn't there Christopher?! It's not an exact science as ever, but it can be used. It's a nice way to look at it.

The final thing that I think we found during the excavation work in October last year was a single piece of flint, which is likely to be prehistoric and of course it's just a nice reminder that, in fact, there was thousands of years of history on this site prior to the battle. So when we're looking at archaeological remains, you have to take that into consideration. The sort of things that you're finding, and it's an interesting find in its own right, in that the Clava Cairns are just down the hill in the valley, and in fact probably there are remains of burial monuments and standing stones on Drummossie Moor in its widest sense. So it's quite a nice thing to have recovered at the same time, but there's a lot more to do.

It was just really nice to get back out onto the ground and to look at some of the areas that we hadn't really thought about before, and it just makes you think about looking back at how the troops deployed, where would they have been at the start of the engagement? And I know Christopher's really interested in that side of things from the mapping, and how they move out into their battle lines, how they deploy into the lines and then move forward, and where they would have been on the ground at that time. And it's something, I think, when you're out on site doing field work and standing on the ground digging holes and looking for artefacts, it does just make you sit and think about it again and say: well, what could have happened?

One of the things that always makes me think about when I'm out doing bits of fieldwork like that, especially at Culloden is just how big an area one of these infantry battalions or regiments -- a battalion would be a single unit -- how much ground it would have actually taken up. Three ranks, I think, three ranks deep. They were probably somewhere like 80 yards/80 metres long, so that's quite an extensive bit of ground. If you have all 400 guys standing there, it must have been quite impressive. And that was just one of the units, and you think of them all lined out across the moor.

[Katey]
It's difficult to picture, isn't it, when you think about the size and the scale of what the battle would have been like. And one of the disadvantages to only owning a core piece of the battlefield is that when we do our storytelling, people have a limited sense of the size and scale of the battle. And I think that's what's really interesting about Christopher's work, which we're going to come on to in a second, is that there's an opportunity to understand both the breadth and depth of the story of Culloden, just in terms of when you think about it in terms of where the men ranged across the landscape, how they used the landscape, and what impact and conclusions you can draw from that. I'm minded of hearing the story of, I believe it was Hugh Miller's grandfather, who stood on the hill outside of Cromarty and he heard the battle. And you think about that, the sounds. I often think about that, the sound that this battle would have had in a landscape that did not have cars, so a pre-industrial landscape. It would have been intense and frightening and overwhelming, and the smell ... I mean, it's a whole level that we're only just touching on. And we're really getting a better sense of it because of the maps. Now, Christopher, you had the opportunity to go and see Derek in action, didn't you? And that really helped you with some of your work.

[Christopher Duffy]
It helped me. I think it's the first time I've ever seen historians and archaeologists talking together! We exist in different universes and we got instant replies, one of the other, on questions which had been bugging us separately for years! And just to talk to the other side, they could give us the answer from our queries and it worked the other way around; it was such an atmosphere as well, absolutely stupendous.

And I think going back to that particular, I just was two days there last October, and I'll say they were the most enjoyable I've ever spent as a military historian. I'll go as far as that! And of particular interest to me was the geography of the site and the extent of the original Cuil Lodair, the yellow bog, which essentially defined how and where the battle was fought. And you're probably aware of William Roy's ordnance map, 1747-55, who shows the extent of the bog in very great detail, and it occurred to me, well let's look at the ground; is there anything left? Perhaps there might be just a slight activity in the ground or change in the vegetation. And particularly the beauty of the bog, which, according to his map, actually lies inside the Trust property. And this is very important because it threw out the direction of the Duke of Cumberland's march. He had to go much more to the south and west than he intended, then cut back until he found a patch of firm ground, which is where the archaeologists were.

Now, I went there in the delightful company of Cat McIntosh with an amazing vehicle, somewhere between a tractor and a tank! And we drove at great speed over the field, scattering the public left and right. She gives no mercy when she drives ... just fleeing out of the way! And I went with a small party. We started at the Well of the Dead, walking. And within I'd say 15 seconds, the party saw where the bog was. It's a distinct little valley, very much overgrown still at that time, and it corresponded exactly where William Roy described the bog as being. I heard last month that the turning of the vegetation by Shetland cows has continued and Cat sent a photograph of what's transpired. And the bog has essentially at that point reconstituted itself, complete with a stretch of clear water, doing exactly as it does on William Roy's map. I thought this work would take years to do, but this is not a peat bog. It's a very particular bog caused by an impermeable lower level in the earth. And the question arises, well, how much more of this bog is left on ground which we don't own? But this particular site is now, I well imagine, will be a very critical part of the visitor experience because it's really quite spectacular in physical terms. And this brings us on to ecology.

What kind of wildlife is going to be the first to turn up there? Plants, birds, animals perhaps. Fascinating -- the landscape is coming to life in front of our eyes. This is a wonderful experience, which seldom very often come the way of historians. It was great and that's just two days' visit! You can't ask better of two days than that.

My general approach to the whole business, I've been involved with the conservation at Culloden since about 1998 I suppose, and drawn umpteen editions of maps. And what's happening now is under real pressure of urgency, because just when we're at the point of learning so much more about Culloden, and Derek will tell us about the view shared and LiDAR scan, this is going to open a completely new dimension of the study, not just of Culloden but other battlefields. And historians are getting together with each other. We're finding new dimensions.

And just when all of this is taking off, we have the increasing threat of development. And this drives me absolutely mad, and the only answer to it I can see is, one of the only few answers I could see, is the long-term objective of actually acquiring land which is the only protection worth anything at all. We've had three conservation zones set up, the fourth is now being constructed, and they're worth very little. They certainly do not provide anything like legal protection for the site. What do we do? Well, one of the things we can do, what I've been striving to do, is say what happened in the battle on this particular patch of ground we're looking at, taking it in 100m chunks, what happened inside that 100 square metres. And this involves a massive amount of looking at every possible source, and the greatest single source I've found is the mapping of the time. There's a great variety of it; it's very hard work to squeeze the juice out of it but my god it's worth doing.

And it has proved possible, I believe, to perhaps say with pretty certainty over nine tenths of the owned battlefield, exactly what happened on a particular spot at the time of the battle. What would be the loss for our heritage to allow any development on that site? Because we've got to put up realistic, detailed and credible objections to developments as they occur. We need to meet them head on. On the positive side, precision guidance (we say) of what happened where on a battlefield will encourage research, excavations, new visitor trails, new aspects of presentation inside the visitor centre, which I'm sure you're considering, given all these new interventions. So, it's really precision history and geography which I think are going to be the key to success at Culloden.

Now, just on the bullets. I won't go into great detail. The Jacobites fired a lot of the French bullets. As Alexander says, it's just a mini kind of difference between them but they also fired a lot of British bullets, because they captured a hell of a lot of British muskets in previous battles. Must be about half of the muskets they had were British muskets firing British musket. So you can't actually say, well this is a British Hanoverian ball because it's the right calibre, because it might well have been fired by the Jacobites! And Lord George Murray is very interesting what he writes of the Jacobite fire. Now, we think of the Jacobites just going, just charging around with the swords and cutting people up, which they did the first round of that, even in the first line of the battle you have second and third ranks are the muskets. And the Lowlanders in the second round, they were armed with muskets also. Their fire could be very accurate, as was proved at Falkirk in January, their great victory. But Lord George Murray says: as the Jacobites charged at Culloden, everybody got in each other's way, so nobody had a really good, clear shot at the enemy; and you don't shoot accurately when you're running through bad ground! Your rifle or your musket's going to be waving all over the place, so this wild shooting is evident, I think, with what's just been found at Culloden. These balls which ended up in the Hanoverian second or third line, so it's all a consistent picture actually. We can all ... I think it's going to ...

[Katey]
Sorry Chris. I was just going to say I think it's really nice when historical evidence, primary and secondary source stuff, then complements what's found on the ground. And there are reasonable explanations. I mean, the thing about archaeology is that you're going for the reasonable explanation, aren't you Derek? You're doing the best you can with the information you have available, and it's really nice when there is a synergy between the two.

[Derek]
Yeah, yeah, it's good. I mean you've always got to remember with archaeology that it's been filtered down through so many different times in layers and the fact that you actually find it is the last bit of the ... so all the stuff that we don't know about is out there still as well, so you've got to be careful that you're not building too much of a hypothesis on some very flimsy evidence! I mean the idea is that we go back and test, and the more we do that, the better understanding we have. I like the interpretation of the fire being filtered and one or two missed shots getting through to the back, but that's something we could test at other locations around about and then start to build up an idea of the concentration of fire. So that would be really useful.

[Katey]
But I think the ... I'm sorry Christopher, I was just saying that I think that the interesting thing is using the maps that you've produced, because you've said that you've been going over the ground and you've been looking at things from a range of different angles, comparing and using what you've said to me is quite a forensic process in terms of exploring this new map that you've produced. And that will be incredibly helpful, won't it Derek? Because you can test the map but you can also see, if we start thinking about some of the periphery action which may or may not impact development but even just in terms of storytelling, looking at the periphery action it will be incredibly useful in terms of explaining to people from a personal level, explaining to people what happened where on the ground, how it impacted the people in the area, how it impacted the communities -- because for us it always has to come back to relevance -- and how it impacts the community today and our story of civil war. I think this can be a very useful tool. I don't know, what do you think Derek?

[Derek]
Absolutely. I mean, I understand getting a wider understanding about it. People tend to think of battles as we've got these maps that have got two lines drawn on them, and that's it. But you forget that of course the guys had to get there and then there's all the movement in between, so battles are fluid things. They're always changing, and of course the things that we're picking up off the ground some of the time are things that were dropped or fired. Now, if they're fired then that's fluid as well.

So actually having a distribution map of these things can be quite difficult to interpret, so the more we do on the periphery and the wider landscape, I think the better understanding that people will have of just how extensive the battlefield was and how mobile it was as well. So, a very useful thing. I was going to ask Christopher about the bog. I know it's on Roy's map; is it on any of the other maps?

[Christopher]
It's on two of his maps, another one. He actually had a very close personal interest in the site. It's too faint to be reproduced in any publication. It gives us more detail on the bog but essentially presents them as they actually appear on his Ordnance Survey map.

The only other map which attempts to represent the bogs is by Joseph Yorke, who's one of the aide-de-camps of the Duke of Cumberland. And he presents them roughly in the area where we now know from Roy's map where they were, but in his map they look like strings of sausages. But he's the one, so he's got it right. The others give up. They have a generalised area of a sort of boggy marsh. Look carefully at them and there's hints as to where they do match William Roy's one.

But William Roy was a professionally trained draughtsman, according to the very high standards that had been reached in military map-making. And they paid very close attention in the 1740s, when they're drawing military maps, to draw in obstacles. And the prominence they're given in this map, we know that they were significant obstacles at the time of the map.

Now, one thing we are missing is very much a look at the estate maps of the estate as it went on through the late 18th century/19th century. Because the bogs were formed essentially by slow-moving stretches on the Red Burn, which was not an actual individual channel but a series of channels, water oozing very very slowly from the south-west to the north-east, so essentially the branches of the Red Burn are moving very very distinctly.

But just going back to the bullets, the kind of bullet we can say was definitely fired by the British, to use that term, was the split bullet. Where individual soldiers that would chop down through a bullet, lead musket ball, almost until it was completely cloven in two; load it as a normal bullet would be loaded but keep together in the barrel where it's fired. But when it left the barrel, it was separated -- two almost distinct lobes. So you get this sort of double bullet, two round sides; two flattened discs. And these were designed for very close range fire, and they're picked up by the excavation. A number were picked up in 2005 in Robin Turner's excavation. And these were designed to cause horrendous wounds at very close range. Now, these could be tested out with blocks of ballistic gel. You could actually test the effect on the human body, or the equivalent of a human body, of a musket ball, a standard musket ball, and the (I believe) considerably greater impact of the effect of one of these cloven muskets. And this could make a very big impact on the body, to imagine what the effect would be. There's so many things we can do with finding out, which could be quite dramatic.

[Katey]
Well, I think that actually makes ... I mean, that comment there's so much we can do, I think that brings us nicely back to you Derek and talking about where we are with the LiDAR, where we are with integrating Chris's maps into our decision-making process around where we're thinking about maybe digging next, what other sort of focuses we feel might work to tell the wider story of the site.

[Derek]
Well, in terms of the LiDAR, we're currently working with EOC Archaeology, who've got the LiDAR data to do more of the view shed analysis that we did. So that was basically taking the topography and the micro topography of the site and being able to look at the individual viewpoints from different positions on the battlefield. And the idea there is to really pick out what are the answers to the questions that we want; what are the questions we want to ask? Where do we want to have views from? What could you see if you were in the front line rank of the government troops? What could you see if you were in the second rank? And of course, the things you've got to be able to see is you forget that of course if you've got cavalry units, they're slightly higher; if you've got guys waving flags, they're slightly higher again. So there are gradients of what you can see from where. I mean, imagine that part of the bits of the Jacobite right wing could see the dragoons coming around through the enclosures; maybe they were completely out of sight before they came into view having knocked the walls down.

So getting an idea of those sort of things across the battlefield, and one of the ones that we've been looking at is the view from the position of the lone French gun that was towards the end of the battle, which was right at the south-east corner -- is that right, Christopher? -- south-east corner of the Culloden parks. And that's quite a good control point for us in terms of understanding the geography of the battle.

So yeah, there's so much we can do. I think we're really ... well, it's a classic archaeological thing isn't it? We're just scratching the surface. We're getting there now. There are so many different parts of the battlefield that we could look at; I suppose it's about prioritising. Often the things that we've done in the past are being led by development work or by putting in new roads, by moving the old road across -- that's something that was done in the past. The fact that the trees came off the big area of the main part of the battle in the 1980s, having been planted in the whatever it was, in the 1950s. So there are areas that we need to test, to see what the preservation is like in some of those areas that are less easy to explore archaeologically just because of the nature of the vegetation, so that's definitely something that we want to test in the future on our ground, on the National Trust for Scotland's ground.

Really, the world's your oyster in terms of which bits, but I think over time, doing wee bits more and more is something that we can do. Archaeology, one of the things obviously is it's a destructive process, so once you've done it, you can only do it once ... and it costs money to do, and it costs money to look after the artefacts once you've done it. So we have to think about it carefully and how much we do. But the other thing is, as Christopher has rightly pointed out, it's a really good way to engage members of the public. When they see it happening and come to either take part or want to talk about it out on the ground, there's something nice about being out in the landscape doing detective work, if you like. I think it brings it alive and it brings the arguments into sharp focus, I think, which is a really useful way to do it. So yeah, there's lots more to be done.

[Katey]
Yeah, I think that's the thing -- it's making the story relevant; it's making sure that people understand how this affects their lives or the stories that we tell affect their lives. It gives them an opportunity to engage with the site, which is from my perspective as Engagement Manager really exciting, but I think (like you say) you have to be strategic about it. You have to be thinking quite carefully; it can't be a potluck thing because archaeology is a destructive process, we want to make sure that we get the most information we can for the most sensible excavation that we can.

And the thing is, we want the Culloden story to keep giving. We want the Culloden story to evolve as well, and there will be new archaeological practices that happen in the next 10/15/20 years -- I mean, who knew LiDAR was going to be what it was?! Well, I'm sure somebody did! But in terms of tools to help understand our landscape -- and it is a living landscape, Christopher is absolutely right in pointing out how the landscape changes over time. It is very much grounded in the community that exists around it, so what we do and how we choose to do it will be reflected on the needs of our community and the stories that we want to explore more of, but I think this is a really exciting time for us.

I think there's an awful lot of movement in terms of trying to find out more, looking at the story that we have told for the past 10 years and seeing how we can update it, make sure it is an accurate story, or as accurate as we can be, because of course we are talking about 275-odd years ago, and making that something that reflects our changing understanding of history and the lenses that we look at history through.

So I think it's great. I'm really pleased that you guys were able to join me and have this conversation. It's been wonderful chatting with you. I hope those who are listening in today enjoyed the chat as much as I have, and I really look forward to seeing what happens next. And I'm sure there will be more to come!

[Derek]
Definitely!

[Katey]
So thank you again!

[Derek]
Thanks Katey; thanks very much.