Culloden and Clava Cairns, Inverness
The grey, bleak skies of yesterday disappeared overnight and this morning saw The Lord of the Glens sitting in its own graceful reflection in the waters of the Caledonian Canal while bathed in warm sunlight.
Straight after breakfast we hopped aboard our coach and meandered our way through some of the more scenic, and less visited areas of Inverness before leaving the city boundaries and making the short drive to the award-winning Culloden Battlefield Visitor Centre. En route Konia explained the great significance of this place and the battle that was fought there in April 1746 (the last battle ever fought on British soil). It was here on that fateful day that the uprising of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite supporters was crushed and their attempt at regaining the British throne for the Catholic religion failed forever. The battle itself was short but bloody with the Prince’s Highland warriors being almost totally wiped out. But it was the bloody aftermath that is remembered more in Scotland to this day. Not content with victory, The Duke of Cumberland ordered that all Highlanders and their way of life should be eradicated to prevent such an uprising ever happening again. These were sad times in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and sounded the death-knell for the old Gaelic clan-system way of life.
Our second stop of the morning took us from 260 years ago to over 4,000 years ago! Clava Cairns, a short drive from Culloden, is an important archaeological site containing three massive stone chambers, two of which are of the “passage grave” type and the third, a large doughnut-shaped ring of stones with no obvious entrance or exit is an enigma! Each of these three great mounds is surrounded by many individual standing stones and all across the ground area are curious raised pathways made from the same river-bed boulders. Who built these structures and why we do not know but they stand in silent testament to a people who were clearly sophisticated in their construction techniques, their ability to organize a large labor force effectively in order to build them, and with a clear design and intelligence behind them.
Following lunch our plans for an early departure from Muirtown Locks and into Loch Ness were delayed for a while due to a mechanical failure in the first set of canal locks that we were due to go through. However this gave us a chance to take a stroll in the afternoon along the banks of the beautiful River Ness. Then later we had the excitement of watching the engineers of the British Waterways as they struggled to close the malfunctioning lock door behind the vessel as we made an attempt at continuing forward into Loch Ness. With cunning ingenuity the engineering team managed to get us through and we enjoyed dinner while cruising the length of Loch Ness, Britain’s largest body of fresh water. The day was nicely rounded off nicely with another true Scottish experience, a whisky tasting on board once we had moored at our overnight berth in Fort Augustus.
