On November 5, 1688, a Protestant Dutch nobleman, William of Orange, landed on the coast of Devon, England and marched his sizeable army to London. After an aborted military conflict on Salisbury Plain, the ruling Catholic Stuart king, James II of England and VII of Scotland, fled to France, and William and his wife Mary (James’s daughter) subsequently became joint monarchs of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
However, for a significant percentage of the population of the British Isles, William and the monarchs who eventually succeeded him, the Hanoverians, were usurpers. This group is called the Jacobites from the Latin for James, Jacobus.
Over the course of the next century, Jacobites in all four nations of the British isles plotted continuously to restore the Stuart dynasty to the thrones of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They took up arms against the government on several occasions, and in both 1715 (under James Edward Francis Stuart) and 1745 (commanded by Charles Edward Stuart), the Jacobites stood a good chance of success.
On April 16, 1746, however, the Jacobite cause was dealt a fatal blow at the Battle of Culloden. Although there continued to be Jacobite activity, including plans for another rising, the restoration of the Stuart dynasty became an impossibility.
But the Jacobites have never been forgotten. They have been continuously sustained in cultural memory which refers to the collective understanding by and of a particular culture and encompasses the ways in which we remember and preserve history, traditions, values and significant events.
As the apex event that effectively put an end to the Jacobites’ attempts to restore a Stuart on the British throne, the Battle of Culloden is often the most recognizable—and misrepresented—site of the Jacobites’ cultural memory. Writers began preserving the site’s memory in print and manuscript in the same year the battle was fought including Tobias Smollet’s Tears of Scotland and Robert Forbes’ Lyon in Mourning manuscript as my colleagues will shortly expand upon. The Battle is a main feature of Sir Walter Scott’s 19th century novel Waverley, and more recently, it has been remembered—albeit incorrectly—in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series which ignited a massive resurgence in tourism to Scotland, the Highlands, and specifically Culloden Moor where the battlefield is preserved by the National Trust of Scotland.
Culloden Battlefield is thus both a literal and figurative site of memory. Literal because it is indeed a physical space or site; but figurative because it has been figured to represent a subjective understanding of the event.
I decided to undertake an embodied-type of project by building a diorama that represents the memory site of the Battle of Culloden. For those that are familiar with the site, you’ll notice that it doesn’t really look like Culloden. Rather, it is representative of the land and the symbolic memorials that are featured on such land. It is a very figurative and barely literal representation of the Culloden Battlefield.
I built this diorama because I have an interest in cultural memory and the ways in which embodied projects can lead to a deeper understanding of memorial processes. I also build much smaller scale dioramas for my dungeons and dragons game, so I thought it would be fun to expand on this hobby by attempting to replicate a memorial site.
When I started this project, I had some choices to make. Did I want to capture what Culloden Moor looked like to contemporary visitors or did I want to emphasise the process of the site’s memorialisation?
I opted for the latter for three main practical reasons: (i) the memorialisation process has made Culloden Field an effective site of memory and thus easier to convey in a representative diorama; (ii) I had been researching, teaching, and writing about cultural memory for the last 8 months, so I was already consumed by the affordances of cultural memory; (iii) and lastly, as contemporary accounts offer differing views of the landscape and because narratives about the Battle have multiplied, a so-called ‘authentic’ imagining of 1746 Culloden Field proved nearly impossible. I thus shifted my scope to capture the afterlife of the field.
Culloden Moor has experienced considerable change since the day of the conflict. In the mid-18th century when the battle was fought, the field was a common grazing ground and featured green open pastures, but at the end of the century, it was, as one contemporary noted, “almost entirely waste moor ground” with a “rather bleak and disagreeable” appearance.
A century later came the most intrusive changes with the planting of swathe forestry and the construction of a public road through the middle of the battlefield. At the end of the century, new farm fields and farmhouses appeared and conifer plantations were extended leaving only small pockets of moorland. By the 1980’s, felled forestry left rough ground ripe for invasive shrubs, but since the 90’s, the National Trust has aimed to restore the battlefield’s 1746 appearance of green pastures. I had originally intended to cover the diorama with heath, but I decided to retain the Trust’s objective of restoring the original pasture landscape.
I also knew I wanted to feature the three main memorial features of the battlefield: (i) the memorial cairn; (ii) the headstones; (iii) and Leanach Cottage.
Leanach cottage is interesting because it has evolved into a primary commemoration of the battle, but it is nearly unrecognisable to the building that would have originally stood in its place. The original cottage was situated in between the regiment lines of the British government troops and most scholars agree that it was used as a hospital for these men.
The cottage has been constantly altered, demolished, rebuilt and altered again since the 19th century. A mainstay of the Culloden tourism experience, the last inhabitant of the cottage, Belle MacDonald, gave tours starting from her home until her death in 1912 and the cottage later became the site’s visitor centre in 1961.
In my research, I was struck by the attention that conservators have given to the roof since 1924 when the Gaelic Society of Inverness replaced the steeply pitched roof with a shallower one. In 1978, the Trust restored the steep roof that is more in line with the original crucks visible in the only original wall. I have also found conflicting reports on whether or not the original roof was thatched, and I chose to represent the thatched roof to call attention to the conservation efforts of these groups.
Conservation and memorialisation efforts of Culloden field really began in the late 19th century. In 1881, the Laird of Culloden, Duncan Forbes, erected both the memorial cairn and the headstones marking clan graves. Most of the headstones feature clan names while the 20-foot memorial cairn reads “The Battle of Culloden was fought on this moor 16th April 1746. The graves of the gallant highlanders who fought for Scotland & Prince Charlie are marked by the names of their clans” and here we can see how cultural memory can evolve over time.
One myth is that the Jacobites who fought at Culloden were all Highland clansmen, though we know that at least a third of the Jacobite army was made up of Lowlanders, English, French and Irish men. The prominence of the cairn helps fuel this myth because it neglects these non-Highland figures in entirety, fashioning the conflict as localised and regionally specific.
Though there is a headstone representing the Irish, French and English who fought and died for Charles Edward Stuart, the gravemarkers devoted to Highland clans far outnumber the others and thus, accompanied by the cairn, they evoke the sense that the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden were overwhelmingly Highland Clansmen.
So what is the overall significance, or rather, what are the consequences of the memorial process of Culloden Battlefield?
Scottish historian Murray Pittock notes that “The tourist industry which protects both heritage and the sentiment it crystallises dictates that the Jacobite ‘clans’ faced Hanoverian ‘regiments’ at Culloden” which has its own connotations. He suggests that the prominence of Clanship at Culloden Field “renders the Jacobite forces as marginal and…akin to a ragbag militia” despite the fact that the Jacobite records illustrate their forces as a formidable army made up of military professionals from not only the Highlands, but also the lowlands, England, Ireland and France.
By emphasising the perceived marginality of the Jacobites, Pittock further contends that they are fashioned into a “doomed yet chivalric role” and because “tourist sentiment is stirred by encouraging visitors to ‘recognise’ their ‘families’ among the graves of the clans” a “domestic, localist interpretation is inserted into an international political and military movement” where “families fight regiments” and where, later, descendants of these families can make their own pilgrimage to Culloden to remember their ancestors’ efforts. The result is that the narrative evolves into a “how brave, how foolish, how sad” kind of story with a “seductively romantic side of primitivism” that imagines “the noble savage’s last stand in his remote wilderness.”
Establishing a memory site thus has its own consequences. It has the power to shift narratives and sustain or even produce myths about the past. But at the same time, these myths can also encourage visits to the site which can then lead to stronger preservation efforts because greater resources are afforded to well known and popular destination sites.
—Genevieve Bourjeaurd, MA Research Centre for Scottish Studies Simon Fraser University
Remembering Culloden 