Entry for April 10, 2007

I have been visiting the battlefield at Culloden today. I always try to make a point of spending at least some of my holidays visiting some site of bloody carnage. In my book a holiday isn’t complete, if I haven’t paid £5.95 to tramp across the graves of some forgotten soldiers.
The National Trust have made a lovely job of the place. You get a nice talk from a second rate actor about the devastating effects of grape shot at short range. Afterwards he even took the trouble to ask the baby if she enjoyed it. She did. She smiled. Later you can even snap your loved ones next to The Well of the Dead – a catchy name for a picnic spot if ever I heard one.
And then you see a snappy wee film about the 1745 Rebellion, and the utter disaster that Culloden was for the Jacobites. At the end the narrator gravely reminds us that “We all owe these men a debt”.
What debt I felt compelled to ask? I asked this inwardly of course – I would not want to risk the wrath of second rate actors clutching bayonets. But I asked it nonetheless. Unless I miss my mark, the failure of the 1745 rebellion, probably cemented the Union of the Crowns, brought peace to Scotland and set us on our way to relative peace and prosperity. Although that isn’t even really the point. I suspect that even if the Bonnie Prince (born in Rome – how Caledonian) had won the day, it would have made no great long term difference. I imagine I’d still be sitting today smugly in a Western democracy.
I came away from the battlefield with a profound sense of the sheer bloody pointlessness of it all. Of course, I appreciate that this is a trick of perspective. I’m sure it’d have been a white hot burning issue for me if I’d been around in the 18th century. But maybe that’s the point. Now – all these years later - it seems like an irrelevance – nothing more than a windy moor preserved to keep the tourists happy.