The ultimate walk of shame

Tired, hungry and demoralised, the Highlanders marched from Culloden to Nairn on the eve of the final and fateful confrontation of the Jacobite Rising. Some 300 years later, Joe Gibbs retraces their footsteps and considers what went wrong

- Joe Gibbs

OFTEN, the veil that separates past from present in the Highlands is barely visible. Old quarrels from distant ages, still burnished, shine brightly through its gossamer thinness. A mere 300 or so intervening years, therefore, are as nothing to the 1,000 participants who attend an occasion such as the annual memorial service for the Battle of Culloden. It is the Highlands’ own Remembrance Day, an event that no other battlefield in Britain can host.

This April, at the cairn on Drumossie Moor, the clans mustered again to lay their wreaths in memory of their dead and of a way of life that perished with them on April 16, 1746. For the last pitched battle on British soil, between Prince Charles Edward Stuart and William, Duke of Cumberland, marked not only the demise of the Jacobite movement, but the end of the old clan system, too.

The service is organised by the Gaelic Society of Inverness. It honours the dead of both sides, although it is principally the Jacobite clans who attend. As the procession of wreathlayers advanced, the society’s chairman Murdo Campbell watched with mild bemusement as an excitable Frenchman stepped forward to salute ‘the real Charles III, Charles Edward Stuart’. Hoping he would not ‘lose my head’ for speaking thus, he stooped to place a tribute to the Royal Écossais, a French regiment that fought for the Jacobites that day.

Loud cheers greeted a wreath brought by a group opposing development around the battlefield. A constant threat of building encroachment haunts the hinterland. Channelling Cumberland, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks plans to march an army of giant pylons through nearby Strathnairn.