July 2, 2009
Moor Misery for the Highlanders
Rode the bus from Fort Augustus to Inverness this morning in about an hour. Checked into the new B&B, then headed for today’s featured attraction, Culloden Moor and the battle that changed Scottish (and family) history.
The fight at Culloden Moor, 16 April 1746, was the last significant battle on British soil. Significant, certainly, but not especially well contested. The Hanoverian British routed the Jacobites (mostly Highland Scot supporters of Prince Charles, Stewart pretender to the British throne) in under an hour, inflicting about fifteen hundred deaths and suffering about fifty.
Sore winners, they proceded to hunt down and kill, imprison, or transport any suspected Jacobites they could catch. They also tried to extinguish Highland culture by banning the tartans (clan colors) and otherwise undermining the clan system.
This and the Highland Clearances that started twenty years later, drove many Scots to emigrate, some of our ancestors among them. Fortunately for the Scots who remained and their culture, a hundred years on Queen Victoria proved something of a Highlands enthusiast, bringing its history and culture back into vogue.
The battle site has been under the charge of the Scottish cultural trust for the past seventy years, and they’ve been gradually restoring the place to its 1746 condition, chopping down trees and restoring the bogs. They’ve also done extensive archaeological work in the last generation, and recently built themselves one of these new-style bells-and-whistles uber museums.
Though falling prey to some of the wretched excesses that we saw in the Welsh Waterfront Museum, Swansea, I think they did a better job of it on the whole. (In defense of Swansea, Culloden had a somewhat easier objective than Welsh national history. Uprisings and battles tend to be linear events, much easier to interpret.) A few things I’d gig them on (no photographs allowed, unfortunately), but an effective museum.
After the museum experience, a walking tour of the moor using a state-of-the-art, GPS-guided, walking wonder tour divice. Man, does this digital age help with museum tours. Photographs, maps (with one’s position displayed), oral histories, narrative, you name it. The potential seems unlimited. They took advantage of the medium’s potential, but did it in an understated, respectful way.
Once we got back into town (a bit of a struggle since the tour bus system died recently and the city busses have other responsibilities), we had dinner, then cruised for souvineers. We took our business, naturally, to “Highlands House of Frasers,” those being our antecedents. I’m trolling for a hat in Fraser tartan, and found several examples, each perplexingly different.
I didn’t make the final selection because it must have been ninety-something degrees in the store (twenty degrees hotter than outside) and I didn’t want to sweat up their nice hats by trying them on. So I’ll go back in two days and have another go. Do I have enough courage to ignore the hipsters’ ridicule and buy a tam? We shall see. But before that we drive into the steely jaws of death tomorrow—on the wrong side of the road!
July 1, 2009
Loch Idyll
A bit of a layabout day today; didn’t do too much. I wanted to find some place that would rent me a boat and do some paddling on the canal, but no such luck. The nearest rental place is six miles away, too far for us ground pounders.
So we settled for a pleasant one-hour cruise on a couple of miles of the southern end of Loch Ness. The tour had a recorded audio component, but it would cover what it needed to, then shut up for long spells, which is pleasant. I’m a little mystified by the ones who think I come aboard hoping to be bombarded by patter.
According to the tour, Loch Ness has more fresh water in it than all of the other bodies of water in Britain combined. This I find a bit hard to believe, but it’s certainly very large and very beautiful. It’s existance was one of the reasons British engineer Thomas Telford dug the Caledonia Canal down the Great Glen starting in 1803. The waterway runs sixty miles, but by routing it thorough Loch Ness and then Loch Lochy to the south, Telford’s gangs were only obliged to dig twenty-two miles of the route.
Still, a massive undertaking of twenty years duration. The canal’s locks were built 150 feet long and 35 wide, among the largest of the day. This to permit sailing ships to use them to avoid French privateers and the graveyard of the north Scottish coast.
By the time the canal was finished, however, the Napoleonic Wars were over, and ships soon outgrew the locks. Some commercial fishing vessels still use them, but these days it’s mostly pleasure craft—certainly all of the customers we saw, with the exception of what looked like a tugboat. Not sure how how she got in there.
Fort Augustus sits at the southerrn tip of Loch Ness. After the boat tour I stuck my feet in the loch and played the fife for a bit. That particular instrument disturbed Waikiki Beach last year, so it seems to have the western hemisphere pretty well covered now.
The beach itself is a rock garden; hard to imagine people wading or swimming there, but people do. The bottom is littered with scrap iron and numerous ceramic sherds of plates, bottles, and such. I did a little underwater archaeology, recovering sherds with some interesting shapes and patterns, presumably from the dark mists of antiquity. Imagine my disappointment when I recovered a sherd that read:
Expressions Fine China
Linen Leaf
Dishwasher, Fr . . .
Oven and Microw . . .
Post Enlightenment, I concluded.
(In fact, Fort Augustus is the site of maybe the first serious underwater archaeology. Just after 1900, a local monk borrowed some diving gear from canal workers and used it to explore the construction of a man-made island at the mouth of the Oich River on Loch Ness.)
June 28, 2009
Moors the Better
A train day mostly, this. Barbara managed us into a slightly unorthodox transit (with two changes) from Liverpool to Glasgow in order to pass over the Settle-Carlisle line. This, the guidebooks tell us, is one of the more scenic rail routes in Britain. In that it certainly didn’t disappoint; better still, we had great seats on a lightly populated train.
The English and Scottish countrysides north of Liverpool are much like those heretofore: small fields separated by stone walls inhabited mostly by dairy cattle and sheep. This country is somewhat flatter and less tree covered, however, yielding something new in our British experience—vistas. In north Yorkshire and lowland Scotland the trees disappear entirely, revealing beautiful open moors.
All in all, an excellent day on the rails. We reached our hotel in Glasgow at 3:30, and by 4pm were out roaming the town on a first reconnaissance. This included walking along the banks of the Clyde River, visiting the city’s large waterfront park, then looping back home through the city’s commercial section.
The park contained the first monument raised in Britain to honor Admiral Nelson, erected in 1806, and a live cricket match. Watching that for ten minutes or so, seeing things you can’t see on TV, cleared up a few questions I had about the sport. The match was being played by Indians or Pakistanis in their native language and seemed, like most American pick-up sports, to involve as much discussion and debate as actual play.
Liverpool to Glasgow; from one of the world’s great centers of shipping to one of its great centers of shipbuilding. Tomorrow we explore the Clydebank.
