Driving through the Uists—islands in the Outer Hebrides chain—you can sometimes drive a very long time without passing another car. The birds are there, you are never far from the sound of surf hitting beaches, on clear days, there is a low murmur of clouds far off near the horizons, the islands themselves are, in fact, the very definition of beautiful, particularly when you drive for long distances from island to island, hopping ferries as you go . . . but there are not many people. It is an absolutely lovely place to live, but there are few living people there. In 1861, the Outer Hebrides had 36,319 people. One hundred and fifty years later, there were 27,684.1
I was on my way to play Askernish—a ghost course, maybe even a legendary course designed by Old Tom Morris, for decades forgotten or misplaced, the passage of time curbing and stinting it, holes from the original disappearing or being casually changed until, by the 1990s, a century after its magnificent beginning, it had become no more than a local nine-holer, dowdy in its appearance, rather ordinary in its golfing, lost among sand dunes and the machair.2
And there are few people. Seagulls wheeling and sheep bleating, flowers everywhere, but few people.
I had left the small island of Berneray late and it must have been noon when I saw a World War I memorial off to my right, up above the coast, looking out to sea. I stopped.
I didn’t count the names, but on an island which may never have held more than 2,000 people, the sheer volume indicated how grim the war had been.
War memorials are omnipresent in Scotland. In its Civil War, the United States had killed off about a tenth of its adult population in (and wounded or left ill probably another twenty-five percent). That toll pales, though, beside the numbers of dead you see listed on the Scottish war memorials. The sheer number of Scots killed in war, from a small population, can scarcely be comprehended.
The Great War had killed an entire generation of young men, leaving behind a generation of unmarried women—and a paucity of children.
A second great war came after the first Great War, this time caused by a monomaniacal zealot intent on showing the world the innate superiority of the German races. He lost, but many more Scots died. The monuments from the first Great War soon had new plaques added to them and many new names.
Although I have been a professional historian for forty-five years, I had never really appreciated the loss that almost all of Scotland suffered during the many wars conducted by the British Empire.
And, before I actually came to play golf in the Highlands, I had never heard of Culloden.
Most Americans have never heard of the Battle of Culloden. So when a car I had rented broke down near Culloden, I had a chance to visit a battlefield of which I had never heard. What historians in their right minds could turn that down? The actual losses of men at Culloden were relatively small and the duration of the battle, a little over an hour, about equaled that of Pickett’s Charge during the afternoon of the third day of the battle of Gettysburg. Casualties in Pickett’s Charge, though, were about eight times that of Culloden. Yet, when I nursed my car into the Culloden parking lot, I could see that this seemingly small battle had been commemorated with a large beautifully designed visitor’s center. So . . . I’ve been a historian a long time and everything I could see was saying that the actual casualty figures were probably not nearly as important as other things.
The first steps on the sidewalk to the visitor’s center brought home just how much history rested on this wee battlefield. It is paved not with bricks, but, for its entire length, memorial stones. Many of them from clans, many of them from the United States.
In 1745, the Scots, or at least a goodly number of them (called Jacobins) attempted to put the Scottish royal family, the Stuarts, back on the throne of a United Kingdom. The Stuarts had ruled the United Kingdom from 1604 to 1688, had been tossed off the throne in what is called the Glorious Revolution (1688), and then won the backing of the French to try to retake the kingship. An invading Stuart force landed in the western isles, was joined by Highland and Hebridean forces and marched through Scotland and then deep into England. Yet, for a multitude of reasons, they turned back despite having what certainly appears to have been a successful and (perhaps) promising foray.
An English army followed the retreating Jacobins northward as they fell back toward Inverness, in the heart of the Highlands and about two-thirds of the distance to the farthest north point of mainland Scotland. After the Scots army passed the River Spey (home today of many fine distilleries and golf courses), their commanders seem to have become all but daft. It is hard to think of another modern military undertaking so singularly bereft of sound decision-making as what occurred shortly before the actual fighting. The skills and decisiveness that had brought the army so close to the middle of England disappeared in clouds of ill-judgment and divided councils.
No details are needed. A series of horrid decisions, on the 15th and 16th of April, 1746, doomed, quite literally, a large number of soldiers and any hope of a triumphant Scotland. In a little over an hour, the English all but destroyed the troops sent forward to attack them on the plains of Culloden, the Scots losing ten men for each English casualty. The Scottish regiments, thoroughly demoralized, fell back and then, despite significant reinforcements close at hand, scattered. The English hunted them down like dogs, killing instead of accepting surrenders. We will never know how many Scots died over the next few weeks. The number had to have been high for only about sixty live prisoners were taken by the English . . . .
And then the English decided to destroy as much of the Scottish/Highland culture as could be done, even banning kilts. While I was on the little-known Isle of Seil off the west coast, I passed a pub (the “Tigh an Truish” or “House of Trousers”) where those going to the mainland would change from kilts to trousers and those coming back from the mainland would slip back into their kilts).3 The English were dead serious about exterminating Scottish/Highland culture, and perhaps anything else contributing to “Scottish” culture.4 As pogroms go, the English pogrom of the Scots was dogged and persistent and, in terms of culture, darned effective.
The problem was that while the English had quite a go at destroying Scottish culture, they had no hope of destroying the Scots. Given the long tradition of battle in Scotland, a systematic attempt to destroy the Scottish people would have been foolhardy and just might have resulted in a more successful attempt by the Stuart family to reclaim the throne.
The English, nevertheless, had a problem. They needed soldiers for their growing empire. The Scots had a complimentary problem: they were poor. Although the English may not have trusted or respected the Scots, they were more than willing to pay the Scots to die for them.5 The Scots, including the Highlanders, would fight for the English, their soldiers could wear their kilts, and their regiments could keep their “pipes.” And, of course, they got paid.
While my car was being repaired outside of Culloden—which would take twenty-four hours after I had called to tell the rental company that I had a problem—a member of the Scots National Party (who had seen me looking at the car ruefully) took me in for the night. Oddly enough, with two SNP activists and a political historian in the same room, the talk turned to politics, and I eventually asked why the Scots fought, and died, for the British in such numbers and he and his wife answered, almost in unison, “king’s shilling.”
If so, the Scots were underpaid.
Today (2024), though, the Black Watch, the Cameron Highlanders, the Gordons, the Royal Scots, all the grand panoply of martial Scotland, are now receding in memory, perhaps a tradition beyond the ken of a younger people with all the screens and devices through which they can travel into another era, one where the brave souls of Culloden count for little. And, it may be that soon, all that will be left of the brave Scottish tradition will be aging monuments which, often in distant, mostly depopulated, places, dot the landscape.
It was in a somber mood indeed that I turned away from the memorial there in the Uists and headed for the another memorial that turned, at least at face value, on the presence of a different type of Scottish heritage, Askernish Golf Course. But therein lay a different, if perhaps equal, story of dedication.
Just a note to my Scots friends, I will touch upon the “Clearances” in a different chapter.
A word is needed about machair. It is a rare type of soil composed of mostly crushed, actually powdered, seashells fertilized first with kelp and seaweed and then animal droppings and found almost solely in the Outer Hebrides. If you can imagine a soil composed of powdered seashells, kelp, and seaweed, and then heavily, and I do mean heavily, fertilized by seabirds, sheep, and cattle, then you have a sense of the richness of this soil found so far from mainland Scotland. Long strips of this odd and unusual soil run130 miles along shoestring islands stretching north and south through a very chilly Atlantic Ocean.
They tried to be so thorough that the (Scottish) Education of Act 1872 not only banned the teaching of Gaelic, but made students who spoke Gaelic turn in, under threat of dire punishment, those from whom they had learned the language.
General James Wolfe, who fought at Culloden, would, later in the Seven Years War, lead the English and the Scots to victory at the climactic Battle of Quebec (1759). He would die on that battlefield personally leading both Scots and English into battle. Wolfe, though, once said disdainfully that the Scots could be used as cannon fodder since it would be “no great mischief if they fall.”