O'er moorland and brae: Culloden, Clans, Cairns and Tartans

We came to Culloden: a stricken place. Just a few miles from Inverness. Today, the battlefield is covered in heather and grass and bog, probably much as it was when Bonnie Prince Charlie lined up to do battle with Prince William, for the throne of England.

Bonnie Prince Charlie was the son of the man who would be king, James VIII, 'the Old Pretender'. With his Jacobite supporters, mainly Scots Highland Catholics, the Bonnie Prince set about attempting to win back the throne for the Stuart line. His supporters believed they would be better off under Stuart rule as they had been in the past.

Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, was the son of the reigning English king, George 11. Cumberland sought to keep the crown for his father. His Redcoats were mainly English, tho' there were dissenting Scots among them as not all Scots supported Charlie's cause.

The two princes were young. And they were related. They had a common great grandfather, way back. But they were clearly not friends.

The army of Jacobites had walked to Derby and back in the last little while: winning battles it is true, but gaining little in the way of support or commitment for their cause. By now they were broke, hungry and seriously dispirited. The night before Culloden, they'd trudged aimless miles from Inverness to Elgin hoping to surprise Cumberland and his men before dawn. But the sun rose on their march, and spies reported seeing them, so they lost any advantage they thought to gain, and exhausted and in filthy weather, they turned back to Inverness with Cumberland and his men fast on their tails. Twenty-two needless miles walked on the eve of what was to became the battle of Culloden.

The Redcoats were in fine fettle. They had been given extra whisky and rations on Cumberland's twenty-fifth birthday. They had partied. Their blood was up. They were well trained, well fed and well rested. They were ripe for a barney.

The two armies met, and lined up to fight on Culloden moor, outside Inverness, a little after midday on 16 April 1746.

Just one hour later, the moor grasses were sodden with the red blood and butchery of the Jacobites, 1500 of whom lay dead or dying, in the Culloden bogs.

Injured Jacobites, lying in the field, were finished off by the English. Who showed no mercy. War artefacts littering the field hundreds of years after the battle tell the grim and gory tale. Buttons are brutally splintered. Buckles mangled. Shot damaged splinters show point blank range.

Just fifty of Cumberland's men were killed.

But the villagers huddling to watch this massacre were also the losers. Cumberland, in his fashion, demanded that they dig huge graves, then pile the dead Jacobites into them, en masse. This they had to do.

Today, clan cairns stand in memory of the loss of so many of Scotland's young sons.

The Bonnie Prince was whisked away as the battle unfolded. For five months he was successfully hidden by supporters, and once, barely escaped capture by dressing up as Flora MacDonald's handmaiden, and escaping 'across the sea to Skye'.

From Skye, he boarded a friendly boat and returned to Europe from whence he had come, and despite his loss, was feted in Paris for months: treated as a celebrity. Which did not last long. Three years on, he was expelled from France. He eventually died alone, in 1788, destitute and an alcoholic, having lost his wife and his supporters. Long gone.

Cumberland, the 'Butcher', as he came to be known after Culloden, fared little better. His military successes were short lived, and he died relatively young.

And while the Culloden battle was brief and barbaric, the reprisals were immediate: they changed Scottish history forever.

The clan system under which the Scots people had lived for centuries was quickly broken down. Wearing a clan tartan along the Inverness High Street, even as early as 1751, drew a penalty of imprisonment, or transportation. Land ownership changed. No longer was land held by the clan chief in trust for clan members; clan lands were forfeit to the crown. Except for those dukes who supported the Redcoats. They kept theirs.

Landlords now bought and owned the land themselves, and when they found sheep more profitable than lowly tenant farmers who often could not afford to pay their dues, so began 'the Clearances': removing the Scots from the land that once had been theirs by virtue of their clan connection. But, no longer. And never again.

Our next stop was down the road from Culloden: the Clava Cairns: barely a mile or two: a burial place prepared by Bronze Age people, which, unlike the mass graves of Culloden, beautifully honoured the dead.

These cairn tombs were built some three or four thousand years before Culloden, by a prehistoric people who went to great trouble to gather heavy stones, to beautifully etch the important threshold stone, and to plan intricate passage tombs, or ring cairns, with mathematical precision so that the elements, the sun and the moon, honoured their dead. They, then, ringed these cairns with an outer perimeter of majestic standing stones when the tombs were no longer used.

Stones for the ring cairn construction were carefully selected for size and colour. Stones were laid in wedge segments on a circle base: first a wedged segment of pink stones, then a wedged segments of white stones , and so on, completing the circle, just like the slicing of a round cake. Large stones were raised higher where the sun set; shorter ones were lower where the sun rose.

The passage tombs had a tunnel entrance, low and linteled, with a drystone roof covering the burial cavity rising three metres above the ground: all the sloped stones over the internment were held in place by a keystone. It was dark and peaceful inside, except at winter solstice. Then, the cairn was meticulously angled so that a beam of light from the setting sun would brilliantly illuminate the interior of the tomb. And, on the opposite wall, quartz stones were laid to precisely catch the glow of the sun as it rose of a morning.

The tomb was all light and colour and love for the beloved dead.

Not only that, but the design of their cairns is beautiful, so carefully constructed that even today they are quite brilliantly preserved.

After Culloden, the wearing of tartan was banned for nearly 100 years. These days, while the old clan system no longer exists, all over the world there are families with strong familial links back to Scottish history when clans were strong. Many of these families still use modern Highland kilts as part of their formal dress, to honour their family traditions.

We visited the House of Fraser, a Kilt-making Centre, on the banks of the River Ness in Inverness, just a few kilometres west of the Culloden field, to check out the state of kilt-making today.

Their workshop is small. Their kilts are entirely hand-made, and, in a good week they are able to complete 20 to 25 in all. In a year, only about a thousand.

The work is slow and painstaking. It involves laying out the cloth, marking the pleats, the measurements of which are different for each person, depending on the size needed and the pattern of the plaid material; sewing the pleats, basting, cutting out the thickness from of the back of the kilt, and canvassing the back for strength; adding the buckle and straps, the lining, the pressing, and, lastly, the final inspection. The finished kilts are elegant and expensive.

A far cry from the old clan days when a clansmen would lay his belt down on the ground, pleat a length of homespun fabric in a vertical fashion over that belt, then lie down and pleat the remaining fabric over the front of his body, while fastening the belt at his front, then standing to fold the top piece over his belt, hiding it, and holding it all at his waist. He would have a beautifully hand-pleated kilt in just minutes. But, not since Culloden.