Cruising Loch Ness & Culloden

This morning we cast off from the picturesque village of Fort Augustus at 8:30 AM. We docked overnight at the southern end of this most famous loch directly across from the old site of the original fort. The clouds hung low on the mountains which framed the loch; the temperature was about 65ºF -- a perfect day for Nessie spotting.

Centuries have now passed and despite the fact that there has been no definitive evidence of Nessie, the belief and the search continue. Loch Ness is the deepest and coldest of all the lochs and I can attest to the latter after having swum ever so briefly in the lock yesterday afternoon.

After lunch we visited the site of the ill-fated battlefield of Culloden. On this very spot April 16 1746, the Jacobites, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, had left their many successes in England after their victory in Derby without pressing their advantage and marching on London. They retired to Scotland and spent the next seven weeks of the winter of 1746 bivouacked in Inverness.

In the meantime the Duke of Cumberland, the second son of King George the II, had reached Aberdeen by February 1746. He was joined by thousands of Hessian troops and likely had three times the size of the army as Charles and his highlanders. The decision was made to meet the English on Drumossie Moor, now called Culloden. The choice for the battle location, made by one of Charles’ generals, William O’Sullivan, an Irish Jacobite, was not a smart one.

The rough topography was ill suited for traditional highland fighting. The night of the 15th of April Cumberland’s troops were celebrating and drinking heavily. Lord George Murphy proposed that the Jacobites should mount a sneak attack at night on the English catching them by surprise as “drunk as beggars.” The attack was a fiasco as they only got within two miles of the English as the sun started to come up and they were forced back to camp not arriving until 7AM. The opposing armies met each other at 11AM and although there are numerous accounts of the battle, the long and the short of it is that the greater number of English troops and their cannons decimated the ranks of the highlanders.

When the order was finally given for the highland charge the boggy ground limited its effectiveness. The battle was over in less than an hour and the Duke of Cumberland killed all the wounded. The Jacobite resistance was crushed forever and Bonnie Prince Charlie eventually was sped back to the continent and lived the rest of his life in Rome.

We then visited Clava Cairns, a wonderful site from the 3rd millennium BC. We know virtually nothing about these people who built this multi purpose stone site. It was likely used as a place of liturgical worship, a solar observation site, an important civic gathering place, and likely it held some sacred meanings for the people. The people who built Clava Cairns were already domesticating grains like barley and were no longer hunting and gathering. Their communities were likely no larger than a few hundred. These stone structures can be found the length and breadth of the British Isles from Stonehenge in the south to Callanish in the Outer Hebrides to Maes Howe in the Orkneys.

We returned to the Lord of the Glens after a fabulous day to a farewell celebratory dinner. I cannot conclude without remarking on the quality of the trip, the enthusiasm of all and the stunningly good weather which greeted us every day.