(12:22 PM): There were two other couples staying at the bed and breakfast. They are sort of following our path but backwards. I was a little shy at first, but eventually we talked with them. They were from Surrey. We were going the same place they were first thing--Culloden Battlefield.
April 16, 1746, the last battle was fought on British soil (I'm not sure how much consideration was given to the Battle of Britain which was certainly fought above British soil). At Culloden, Bonnie Prince Charlie fought government troops in the employ of King George II, a hated enemy. There is a sub-text in what we see in that Charlie was not all that Bonnie and that the enemy was not all that hateful. If you read between the lines at the presentations, you discover that Prince Charlie was not really all that Bonnie and the government he was rebelling against waited 50 years for tempers to die down and to have some trouble with some colonists in the New World, and then started building up Scotland's industries. Even at the time of the battle, there was a sizable Scottish faction that sided with the government. Today, in fact, the Jacobite Rebellion is framed more as a civil war between anti- and pro-government forces.
What happened was James VIII had what would have seemed like the rightful claim to the crown of Britain, and he was a Stuart and hence Scottish. He was a Highlander and had the background to preserve the Highlander way of life. Parliament passed him over and put in George I. Among other reasons there was that George was the 'right' religion. The Stuarts were Catholic. James's son Charles led a second rebellion--there had been one previously--to put his father on the throne, and incidentally make himself heir to the throne. He got some fierce Highlander warriors together and some Jacobites along the way (a Jacobite supported Jacobus, James's name in Latin). Charlie fought his way south from the Highlands from July to December of 1745. He had stunning victories and in December he was 127 miles from London in Derby. King George started to make plans to flee the country. Charlie had problems of his own. He'd expected more Jacobites to join him as he went along. He got fewer and his own men wanted to return home to plant the next year's crops. Without a defeat to his name, Charlie and his troops were demoralized, and on a date called Black Friday his troops set off for their homes. George II's son, the Duke of Cumberland, gave pursuit. The two armies met at the field of Culloden and the rest is history. But so was the preceding stuff, so I might as well continue.
The Duke had 8000 troops and better guns, but his army was hired. Bonnie Prince Charlie was in his own land fighting for what he believed in. He had 5000 brave Scotsmen. Forty minutes later 1000 Scots were dead and only 400 government troops. Charlie had to think fast if he were to save the day. He couldn't think that fast so he fled.
After adventures of hiding and being smuggled from one group of supporters to another, he was smuggled (some say reluctantly) to the Isle of Skye by Flora MacDonald, who disguised him as her maid. According to one source, he never even wrote her after she risked her life for him. Bonnie Prince Charlie escaped from there to France where he did little notable but drink the rest of his life. Supposedly the Highlander lifestyle died out as a result. The Duke's men raided Scotland, killing about 3000 more people. Kilts and bagpipes were outlawed. Jacobite supporters were executed. A modest reparations bill was exacted. Then the government went in and built schools and established land reform. After another forty years the Jacobite cause was dead, confiscated lands were returned, and kilts and bagpipes were once again legal. Scotland pretty much felt that the British government might not be so bad for Scotland even if the King wasn't a Stuart.
We went to the battlefield and saw displays and a short film. Then we walked through the battlefield. It is a pleasant enough walk, but not very enlightening. You just see stones where the various clans began the battle.
From there we went to the nearby Clava Cains. A cairn seems to be much like a souterrain but entirely above ground. It is a house made of piled stone. These cairns seem to be each surrounded by 12 stone monoliths. They are each about 100 feet in diameter. These are impressive sights that date back to the 2nd or 3rd Millennium BC. While we were there we saw another couple and I offered to let them read my copy of GUIDE TO ANCIENT SITES IN BRITAIN. As it turned out, they had the book and had already visited most of the sites. Though they were from Seattle, they'd been several times to Britain.
Next stop was Cawdor Castle. Most of these castles have long, dull prose descriptions of the contents of each room. Cawdor Castle is unique so far in that the room descriptions are full of wisecracks. If there was a low passageway, they'd say something like, 'Please watch your head unless you are a Papuan pygmy.' Nothing hilarious but usually unexpected.
Legend has it that the Thane of Cawdor was given permission to build a fortified castle. His local black magician told him to put his treasure on an ass and where the ass sat down to rest, build his castle. The ass sat in the shade of a hawthorn and there the castle was built. (I'll bet you thought this was a joke.) We saw the Seattle couple at the castle.
Well, next we wanted to go to Craig Phadrig Vitrified Fort, a site from our ancient sites book. Nobody knows how these forts got vitrified, but apparently stone forts somehow had their stones melted and fused.
Unfortunately, the roads had been very much changed since our books was written. The ancient sites book gives directions on how to find the sites and they are usually pretty good. This time they were completely inaccurate. It took us a long time to find the site and then it was strenuous climb to find the fort. And what did we find when we got up there? The hill it had on had a flat top and a dent in the center. That's all. And for once the picture in the book had no resemblance at all to the actual site. I suspect that the authors couldn't find the fort and didn't want to admit it. Besides a nice view of the valley around it, there wasn't much to see. We'd spent about two hours on it and it looked like a dent in the ground.
Evelyn was near tears but I was there to lend a strong hand and keep her spirits up. (Of course, that's not the way she remembers it.)
Well, it was getting late and we had one more site Evelyn wanted to see. There is a Loch Ness Monster Museum. I gave up my belief in Nessie a long time ago, I'm afraid. And I certainly don't think a tourist museum is much of a place to get a fair presentation of the facts, though I will say that the museum was even-handed. It did not assume the thing existed and give a one-sided argument. The museum is very small and hardly worth the 1.65-pound admission.
We had dinner in a bar near the museum. It was mediocre. Then a stop to get pens so I could continue this log and we returned to the B&B. There is a Japanese couple and a German couple on our floor tonight.
September 7 (8:02 AM): Evelyn figured out why the shower wouldn't work for me yesterday. There is an electrical switch in the hallway that turns on the Triton T-80. Now, silly me, when a shower doesn't work, I just don't think to ask myself, 'Did I forget to flip a switch somewhere?' Well, I was able to play Phantom of the Opera for one of the other guests this morning. I heard them clicking the dials of the Triton T-80 in a vain attempt to get water out of it, much like I did yesterday. I made myself presentable enough to be seen in the hall. By this point the poor person had given up, and I flipped the switch in the hall. The water turned on in the bathroom, probably to the surprise of whoever it was in the bathroom.
The weather today seems much like yesterday: bright sunshine, cloudiness, rain, and bright sunshine again in relatively short succession. Yesterday it rained twice, both at times we were outside looking at ancient sites.
We are now through sixteen of our twenty-two days in Britain (Saturday to Saturday; I don't count the final Sunday because we won't be doing much but traveling). That's about 73%, or about 85% subjectively. At the beginning of a trip, time moves more slowly than at the end. Time seems to pick up speed the later you are in a trip at a rate, I guess, proportional to the amount of the trip that has passed. I figure that is because you have more to compare it to. In any case, the math says you take the proportion of the way through the trip and take its square root. I'd draw the graph to show this but I have been warned not to write anything in my log that cannot be typed in. :-)
An integral part of British breakfast seems to be toast and lingering thereover. Anything else can be left out of breakfast and they will somehow muddle through. If there's no toast, it's not breakfast. A group yesterday at breakfast, the group from Surrey, were talking about how some place didn't serve toast until the end and how inconvenient that was.
Well, we are here at Urquhart Castle. I can't hear the name without thinking of Robert Urquhart, whose claim to fame was that he played Paul Kremper in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. The Castle is right down on the Loch. I can remember seeing it when driving across the other side of the Loch. Apparently Edward I besieged a castle here, destroyed it, and built another one.
(11:16 AM): Correction: this is not the castle I saw from the other side of the Loch. This one was blown apart in the first Jacobite Rebellion. It stands in ruins and being in ruins, like St. Andrews Cathedral, it is more interesting than had it been left intact. There still is a high tower well worth climbing that yields an impressive view of Loch Ness.
I took a lot of pictures with Evelyn for scale. (She really needs a better shampoo.) She will show up in a lot more of the trip pictures than I will, for which the people who see the photo albums will no doubt be grateful.
On top of the rocky vitrified fort of fused rock, the Castle just reeks medieval. From there we went to change some money in Drumnadrochit. The radio had an interview with someone who'd just written a book called TALKING FILMS. One of the more interesting things he said was that John Gilbert was to marry Greta Garbo. She did not show up at the wedding. Louis B. Meyer asked Gilbert why did he have to marry Garbo if he'd already slept with her. Gilbert got upset and knocked Meyer down. This was a major faux pas. You didn't do things like that to a studio executive. Gilbert was already highly paid and Meyer wanted an excuse to be rid of him. Sound was just coming in and Meyer instructed the sound department to make Gilbert's voice sound higher on the soundtrack. Audiences quickly decided Gilbert was not their cup of tea in sound films.
We listened to this on the way to Corrimony Cairn. This again looks like a pile of stones with a circle of monoliths around it. The book says there are only eleven monoliths, but in fact there are the usual twelve, though one is broken so it is not as big as the others. Seen from the top, the cairn is an anulus with a circle at the center maybe ten feet in diameter and an outer diameter of forty to fifty feet. The stones are piled maybe eight to ten feet high at the highest. There is a path to the center in most cairns. In this case it is covered for a distance. The tunnel is about two feet high, so the cairn must be entered on hands and knees.
As you may have gathered, the ancient sites of Scotland are not at all commercialized. There are no stands selling guidebooks, souvenirs, or drippy ice cream cones. There is no Corrimony Restaurant offering pleasant views of the cairn to be enjoyed with greasy hamburgers and watery Cokes in sweaty paper cups. You can't even buy postcards with faded color pictures of the cairn. It makes you wonder if these Highlanders will ever be civilized.
From there it was back to the center of Inverness for the last time. We got our reservations for Ullapool. |
