On the day we left Inverness we had planned to stop, maybe for a short time, at Culloden. Visiting the battlefield, the site of the last battle fought on British soil, was a much bigger experience than I expected. I shared some thoughts about this on Instagram.
The battle at Culloden in April 1746 was the end of the Jabobite Rising of 1745, and the last battle fought on British soil.
The visitor centre/museum was really well set up and told the story with a good deal of complexity and a lot of information from different perspectives.
We also took a group tour of the battlefield. I'd never visited a battlefield before, and it was so strange to walk each front line (conveniently marked with footpaths and red and blue flags) and picture the two armies lining up to face each other across a field.
And although that idea is completely foreign to me, once you delve into the historical context and relate to some of the people involved, it's very easy to see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. War might look different but we humans are still tend to be territorial, angry, and scared, desperately defining our in-groups and out-groups to make sense of things and try to make ourselves feel safe.
I am so glad we took the time to visit the Culloden site. It was strange to learn even though the battle is relatively recent in historical terms, that the locations of many graves and other details about the site are unknown and can't be surveyed because of the use of the site for commercial forestry for a long time.
Below you can see the visitors centre. I like the way it fits modestly into the landscape.
After some lunch, we got on the road for Aberdeen. We stopped briefly in Nairn for a look at the beach. I wish I had known to visit the Nairn Fishwife. This is one of the disadvantages of doing your research post-trip!
We also stopped in Elgin. Here we were more focused on finding a pharmacy open on Saturday afternoon to buy some cold medicine, than sight-seeing. I did take some inadequate photos of this statue, which turns out to be the infamous Wolf of Badenoch. He seems to have been a very angry man with too much power. The statue is in a weird spot, not really in a pedestrian thoroughfare - and we just happened to pass it because of where we parked.
