Saturday, Feb. 26 ---
--- Today’s tour takes us around the Isle of Skye, the large peninsula off the coast of mainland Scotland. It’s nicknamed “the misty Isle” because it is almost always shrouded in mist or fog. It’s a mere 20 miles long and is 25m wide at its thickest point. 12,000 Scots call it home, most spread out in tiny villagaes that live on the coast -- there are over 350 miles of coastline in this glorious place, and we will be driving along them for most of the day, Dave informs us to our delight.
Whereas yesterday’s trip consisted of scenery that was chock full of canals, waterfalls, and sheep, today’s consists of coastlines, more waterfalls, and even more sheep (so it’s pretty much the same, in other words...) Our first stop is Portree, the capital of Skye, also known as “the King’s haven” since a king came there once (one time and they give it a nickname -- can you say “overzealous tourist department?” That’s like saying you’re a ladies’ man after you’ve felt a girl up or calling yourself a chef when you don’t burn the toast.) It was also home to the two largest clans in Skye, the MacDonalds (different MacDonalds) and the MacLeods. These two clans were always fighting with each other, but more on them later.
On our way again we pass the Old Man of Storr, a giant rock formation sticking out of the top of one of the mountains. It’s said to be a giant who was frozen there with his wife, a slightly more diminutive rock phallus right next to him. Over the years the wife began to let herself go (they always do, don’t they?) and she began to erode and crumble, eventually leaving nothing but a sizeable pile of rubble behind. When this happened, three Lochens (mini lakes) appeared in the valley across from the Old Man, and legend has it these are formed from the tears he shed over the loss of his wife. (As we get out to shoot some pics, we have to climb a rather steep and wet hill (a wet hill in Scotland? Never. That’s like saying it’s a cloudy day in London...) to get shots next to a beautiful waterfall. The funny thing was watching all the people slip and fall in the mud, wiping out in a flourish of flailing arms and slipping shoes. Yours truly nearly dumped himself, but my superb muscle control and determination saved me from getting anything other than a soaked sneaker (one of my roommates wasn’t quite as lucky, though. He was running down the hill -- who knows why -- and he was unable to stop since it was so slick. So he’s sprinting down this hill, slipping and sliding every which way, almost wiping out a dozen times but fighting it off, until he gets to the very bottom when he proceeds to wipe out with style, falling partially into the waterfall, coming out with one whole pant leg soaked in water, the other caked in mud up to the knees. The entire bus saw him coming down the hill and all shared a hearty guffaw at his expense.))
Back on the road, we pass large mounds scattered along the bases of the mountains. These are said to be fairy hillocks, the homes of the mischievous fairies that are so big a part of the Highland Gaelic lore. An interesting legend: A man and his wife have tried desperately to have kids. They have sex four or five times a night and still can produce no offspring (four or five times a night for a married couple? Now you know why this is a legend...) The man is frustrated ans so he takes a walk outside the village, midlessly passing several fairy hillocks. Suddenly, something glistening in the grass catches his eye. He bends over to pick it up and sees that it’s a locket, one that glows and looks rather fairy in derivation. The man takes it home to his wife, puts it on her, goes at it, and sure enough, his wife soon gets pregnant.
He is elated, but also a little superstitious -- he knows how finicky the fairies can be, and he doesn’t want to upset them, so he goes back to the hillocks and bends to put the locket back in the exact place he found it. As he stoops, he hears a noise coming from one of the mounds. Getting closer, it sounds like music. Still approaching the hut, it gets louder and then he sees a small hole in the side. He sidles up to the hole and sees a tunnel leading downwards. He climbs in, follows the tunnel, the music getting gradually louder, until it finally opens up to a great cavern where a large fairy party is being held.
The music stops, and a little apprehensive, he walks up to one of the fairies and thanks them for the locket. Well the fairies are quite pleased with this. It’s such a rarity for them to be thanked, they offer the man a drink to join in their celebration. He refuses, but the fairies are quite insistent (and he doesn’t want to upset them, remember?), so he partakes in a little libation. While he’s drinking, one of the fairies approaches him and asks the man to dance. Again he refuses, but eventually relents and has a dance. And then another, and another, and another, until he’s had seven swings around the dance floor. Getting a little worried about his wife, he tells them he has to leave and they understand and thank him for sharing in their celebration.
He climbs out of the tunnel, pops out of the hole, and runs back to his house in the village. As he gets nearer to his house, he sees his wife standing outside, her hand on her hip and her foot tapping to a rhythm only she can hear. When he’s within earshot she screams at him, “Where have you been?” A tad recalcitrant, he mutters, “Well I only had one drink...” “What do you mean you only had one drink? You’ve been gone seven years!” One for each dance he took with the fairies. So the moral to the story is fairies can be mischievious and often will try to get you in trouble, drinking and dancing often lead to more trouble than it’s worth, time is different in fairy world, and most importantly, if you get married you can be sure you’re going to get grief from the minute you hit the door...
We stop quickly to snap some pics of Kilt Rock, a glorious rock formation jutting out of these huge cliffs that tower over the sea and its bouldered shore below (it’s said to look like a kilt, but I think these people work for the same tourism department as in Portree. “We need a catchy name for these cliffs. Something that will bring people from miles around to see them. ‘Pretty Rock Pile?’ No. ‘Sexy Slabs of Scottish Slate?’ Nah. I got it! ‘Kilt Rock!’” “Brilliant, Jim, you’ve just earned yourself a promotion...”) The rock formation is made from sediment and lava that compiled over the years, and erosion has revealed its different layers of vertical columns of deposits and horizontal ones. It’s quite pretty, especially with the view of the sea and of the waterfall erupting out over the rocks and plummeting to the ground far below. (You’re also supposed to be hearing the fairies singing in the background, or the bagpipes playing depending on who you talked to, and you do hear something. Is it just the wind, or is it the fairies calling you to a party?)
Next, Dave takes us on a “wee walk” up the hills of Quiraing. When we actually arrive at the sight after slowly winding up a road that is right in between these towering mountains, we end up at a clearing. Stepping off the bus you realize two things: One, this place is fricking beautiful (“dead sexy,” as Dave says) -- the mountains rise majestically before you, covered in a thick, lush carpet of green grass and moss, the peaks of a neighboring mountain shrouded in low lying clouds. And two, getting to the top is gonna be more than a wee walk, it’s gonna be an outright hike (which is fine by me -- fabulous, in fact -- but I can hear the grumbles coming from the others as this realization dawns on them, too)
No use in waiting for the whiners, so I lead a faction up the mountain, slowly winding our was to the top, artfully dodging the enless pudles that proliferate on the mountain (I say again the phrase that ends up being my mantra for the weekend, a phrase I say more than a Frenchman drinks wine and rips on Americans -- “Damn it, Dave, I swear to God this is the wettest fucking country I have ever seen!” And it is. It rains a ton here -- that’s why everything is always so green -- but the good thing is that, unlike London, it never lasts long. As Dave says, “If you don’t like the weather in Scotland, just wait five minutes.” And it really is that finicky. One minute it’s pouring, the next snowing, the next sunny and beautiful. There’s a little something for everyone in Scotland. (Take that, you knuckleheads in Portree. There’s a frigging tourism slogan!)
Anyway, back to the climb. It takes about twenty minutes to get up the slippery slope, but when we do, the payoff is spectacular. The view is everything you’d expect -- clear, quiet, and stretching damned near towards infinity. As I’m standing here, the wind absolutely hammering me and making me a little leary of my proximity to the ledge, I wonder how much higher I am now than when I was on Arthur’s Seat a few weeks ago -- we reckon at least a couple hundred of feet, maybe more.
After soaking this up for a few more minutes, watching the sheep grazing (and these things are absolutely everywhere in the Highlands -- on the sides of roads, mountains, houses -- and they manage to get to the most remote places, too. (I swear I see one gnawing moss on the underside of a ledge, basically making like Lionel Richie and dancing on the ceiling. More about the sheep later.)
Really pumped, by the view and the accomplishment of obtaining it, I make my way down again, singing at the top of my lungs, running down slopes (and once you start, it’s too slick to stop) and jumping off tiny ledges. It’s quite a rush, and I reach the bottom out of breath, but ready for more. Eventually everyone else gets down and we hop back on the bus. Dave drives us out of the valley, says ‘wee’ a few dozen more times (he even says it twice in the same sentence -- “Ah, that’s a wee bit wee-er than...” Not that’s mastery of your vocabulary...) and I marvel at some of the side roads that we’re driving on. They’re basically one lane roads with these little swells on one side from time to time. It looks like someone punched the road on the side of its ‘arm’ and it’s now sporting a bruise. These bruises are actually byways -- passing places, as the signs say -- and you pull into the swell to let another car pass, or vice versa. Kinda cool, but also kinda dangerous, especially since these roads have more curves than a circle.
We get to the pub for lunch -- a wee place called Flodigarry -- and I have a meal that rivals my Parisian feast in coolness and completeness. What do I get? Haggis, baby, haggis. The most repugnantly prepared foot, both in the actual construction and constitution, but it’s 100% Scottish, so I give it a whirl. It comes out on a big plate -- a big clump of brown meat with white specks in it, some boiled potatoes and pale orangish cubes of something on the side. These cubes turn out to be turnips -- neeps, as they’re called here -- and are rather sweet and quite tasty. (The potatoes are called tatties, by the by) A little leary at the appearance -- it looks like a big pile of shit with chunks of rice in it (sorry to be so graphic, but this was voted Best Description by my table mates) It has the same consistency, too -- a kind of mushy paste -- but the funny thing is, it tastes great. I can’t believe it with all the horror stories I’d heard before, but it’s really freaking good. I eat it all -- the tatties, the neeps, the haggis -- and am astounded. There’s nothing to be afraid of here, this is 100% good. It tastes a little like ground beef that’s been mashed into a fine paste and has chunks of barley in it (barley or oats, as it’s supposed to be, but these definitely looke like barley.)
To make the meal even better, I have black currant (their equivalent to a grape, I reckon) and lemonade, a rather mysterious drink that bars don’t like to serve for some reason or another, according to legend. I decide to take a shot at it -- always ask, right? -- and the guy gives me a little glance of hesitation, but eventually relents and I get it. (It’s really quite good -- very sweet. You should get some if you can. I don’t know if we have anything like it in the States. Look into it.) The feast complete, we pile back on the bus and Dave tells us two rather interesting tales while we’re rolling.
The first relates to the Isle of Skye -- it’s apparently a rather religious place and you can’t do any work on a Sunday (so at least this means there’s no change in the male’s routines. We can still guzzle beers while watching football in our recliners. Phew...) So the women have to prepare the big Sunday dinner the night before (they can cook it on Sunday, but that’s it. Everything has to be ready to go on Sunday, even the table has to be set ahead of time.) They can’t hang the laundry out, shops can’t be open, kids can’t play outside (they even go so far as to tie the swings up on Saturday night so the kids can’t use them). Pretty much the only thing you can do is go to church (big surprise there.)
The other story includes the sheep I referred to earlier. All the sheep you see on the side of the road have strange colored patches on them. Being from a farming community I assume this was merely spray paint put there by the farmers to keep track of their property, but that’s not it (at least, not entirely.) What’s happened is this: the people out here love their wool -- they use it in their kilts, sweaters, scarves, etc. These are rather costly items (especially kilts, which can fetch up to several hundred pounds) and they get upset when the colors of their pricey investments start to fade with washing. So they’ve decided to eliminate this problem (the wool fades because the dyes used to color the wool wears off) by getting wool that is naturally colored, bypassing the dying process (sounds like a plan, both for clothing and life in general, huh?)
How? It’s all thanks to genetical engineering. Ever since Dolly was cloned they’ve been messing around with sheep some more (and they’ve been running tests on them, too) and this is what’s going on here. It’s another ongoing experiment to get pre-colored wool. They’ve altered the color genes of the sheep, grown several thousand embryos with this altered gene to full size, just like Dolly, and now wait for them to mate and reproduce, passing the genes on to their offspring. Right now, the sheep just have patches of color -- reds, blues, greens, oranges -- but with each new generation, it should spread more and more until the entire sheep is that color. So pretty soon you’’l hear Scottish children singing “Baa Baa, Green Sheep, have you any wool? as they walk down the road, and their parents will be calling the odd kids in town the yellow sheep instead of its black counterpart.
We stop, these strange images still crystallizing in our heads, and make our way to Duntulm Castle, a 15th century castle right on the shore. It used to be fought over constantly by the MacDonalds and the MacLeods (them again? Remember? Portree...) and so finally they decided to solve the problem once and for all. They decided to have a race -- a boating race to an island just off the shore and back. Whoever touched the shore first won, and they were neck and neck the whole way until just before the end the MacLeods were pulling away. The MacDonald chief say that they were going to lose, but he was going to be damned if he was going to let them win so easily, so he took out his dagger, pointed it to the crowd gathered on the shore, and then proceeded to cut his hand off. Bleeding rather profusely, he dropped his dagger, picked up his severed hand, and threw it onto the shore, thus clinching the victory for the MacDonalds (technically, they did touch land first...) and seizing control of the castle once and for all. (A related cool sight is the grooves in the shore from when the Vikings would pull their boats right onto the beach, cutting huge channels into the sand that still remain all these years later. Very cool.)
The castle is mostly in ruins, but we head into one of the remaining rooms underground and learn of another MacDonald chief. This one tried to have a kid with his wife for four years, but to no avail (he should have looked for some fairy hillocks, huh?) Finally, all his years of hard work paid off and his wife became pregnant, eventually bearing him a child. The custom back in these days was to baptize the child right away, so the priest took the newborn to perform the ceremony. This whole procedure was a little different than the ones we have today -- no pomp and circumstance and dribbled bits of water on the head. No sir. That’s way to flowery for the rough and tumble Vikings. They just take the baby by the feet and hold it upside down out the window so the Scottish rain could baptize it (if it wasn’t raining, there was no problem. They just waited five minutes, remember?)
The problem with this area, though, wasn’t the lack of water -- it’s that it is subjected to extremely strong winds coming off the shore. So the priest took the baby by the ankles, dangled it out the window, and phffft -- it was gone. A big gust had come and taken it right out of his hands, and by the time they got to it outside, it was already dead -- either from the fall or from the elements. The MacDonald chief was furious, rightfully so, but rather than kill the priest, he killed his wife because it was her fault for bearing him so much trouble (got to love Viking logic...)
We head back outside to play in these murderous winds, and they’re unbelievably strong. I pull my jacket above my head and the wind fills it like a sail, so much so that I’m able to lean forward until I’m at a 45 degree angle with the ground -- the wind is completely holding me up. It’s great fun and we start jumping around, the wind treating our jackets like balloons and trying to lift us off the ground, pausing our descents for a few unsettling seconds. It’s a little unnerving, but very cool.
Piling back on the bus, we stop mere minutes later at an old bridge that runs over this river (isn’t that the implied definition of a bridge? That it runs over water? Sorry, I’m an idiot.) The river is the Sligachan (pronounced slee-ocken) and it’s the border between the Black Cuillens (ragged, snow covered mountains) and the White Cuillens (red, grass covered ones) and the story goes like this: The land on the two sides were owned by two different families -- the MacDonalds and the Macleods (yes, them again.) They lived opposite each other and were still fighting (that boat race didn’t help things as much as they’d hoped) and so they decide to try something else to fix things -- marry one of their members to each other.
So Maggie MacDonald, the loveliest lass of their like, and Rory MacLeod, the best beau of their band, were to be married one year later. The catch was there was to be no sex between the two until married (sounds like my relationships...) This was OK’d and things were going great -- the two even fell in love -- until the day before they were to be wed. Maggie was coming down to the bridge on her horse, closely followed by a helper boy and her dog. Her horse stumbled and Maggie fell face first onto a rock, gouging her eye out.
She went to Rory, and instead of being worried about his firl, he was furious -- furious the MacDonalds would do this to her to make Rory marry a hag. So to retailiate, Rory gouged out the dog’s eye, the horse’s eye, and the boy’s eye. Maggie was distraught -- both by her ordeal and the fact that Rory only loved her for her looks -- and so she dunker her head in the river to drown herself. the thhhhing is, the water of the Sligachan is blessed by fairies, and her eye started to regernerate until new, buecause whoever places their face in the water will be blessed with eternal beauty.
So, desperately in need of help in that department, a brave few of us plunged our faces into the ice cold river to reap the benefits of the fairy magic (The opposite happened to me, though -- I got uglier. Dave said that’s never happened before, so I’ve taken up a letter writing campaign with the Local 404, the fairies division.) (By the way, Rory and Maggie didn’t make up. Their families went to war again, this time figthing the Battle of the One Eyed Woman.)
A bit down the road we stop to pet some hairy coos, those shaggy Scottish stereotypes that are undeniably cool. They’re just tan cows with lots of long fur on them, so much so that if often covers their eyes (making them look a little like Clyde with horns.) Picture a longhorn covered in tan shag carpeting and you’ll be close. We pet them, take some snaps of them, and rub their horns (which are surprisingly warm. Interesting fact about these horns -- they’re supposed to have aphrodisiacal powers. Men of the villages would rub the horns when they were wanting to get lucky, and that’s why we call it being “horny.” Seriously.)
We make our way back to the hostel and Dave tells me one more nifty thing while I eat my dinner of steak pie, chips, peas, and a pint (steak pie is just like a beef pot pie with beer stock gravy) -- tartans of different colors is a new thing. It started at the beginning of the century as the actual clan system died down in Scotland. None of the clans actually had different colored clothing that they used to identify themselves with. Nope. What they used to do was put different types of plants in their hats and that’s how they’d know what clan people were from. (This wasn’t a problem with some of the smaller clans that only had a couple dozen of people in them, but for the bigger clans like the MacDonalds, which numbered in the thousands, you couldn’t possibly know everyone.) So some would have sprigs of heather in their caps, others oak leaves, still others thistle (Dave said he didn’t think any of them stuck feathers in their caps, or proceeded to call it macaroni, but he was going to check...) So this tartan stuff is a bunch of bollocks made up by tourism departments and merchants (Portree again?) to make a buck. Cool, huh?
Butchers, shyster Irishmen, and early transvestites
Sunday, Feb 27 --- This barebones crew was living it up while their compatriots were fighting and dying, but their ability to dodge trouble ended one day when they awoke to see three English warships coming towards the castle from down river. They were fired upon (this didn’t do anything, though, because the walls were fourteen feet thick) and then stormed, being easily overtaken by the plentiful English troops. The English, rather than keep the castle, decided to blow it up (you know how they like to see things go up in smoke, be it Empires or buildings...), a task made that much easier thanks to the Spanish storing 350 barrels of gunpowder in the basement. Even 14’ thick walls can’t contain a blast like that, and Eilean Donan was completely destroyed.
Fast forward to 1908: a man named Faqhar MacCrae (whose first name sounds comically close to the word that follows ‘mother’ in my frequent spells of cussing), a member of the clan who inherited the land the castle was on, is plagued by dreams of a new Eilean Donan castle, one that he is to build, according to his dreams. Dozens of other members of his clan have the same dream, and Faqhar sits down one morning and draws out the plans of the castle from his dream. Construction begins that same year and is finally finished in 1932, which just happens to be around the same time they made an interesting discovery at Edinburgh Castle. Here they discover the original plans for Eilean Donan, and you want to know what? The castle Faqhar built according to his dreams was 98% correct -- only a few windows were out of place. Pretty amazing, huh?
The castle, besides being “really freaking sexy,” as Dave keeps saying, was where they shot a lot of the exterior shots for the Highlander movie and the resulting TV show. (And Dave’s right -- it is really sexy, even in the pouring rain we’re stuck in.)
We continue our journey (which is now in almost blizzard-like conditions) through Glen Shiel, a valley with five rather large mountains sitting on the side of the road. Here’s the scoop: two Irishmen, Paddy and Mick, come to the area, stop at a pub (surprise) and meet two young, gorgeous girls from the town. They get along quite nicely and end up falling in love. The girls are the two youngest daugthers of Willy Bruce’s seven girls, and he doesn’t want the youngest two to be married off before his older girls are.
So, Willy, being the romantic that he is, offers his two oldest daughters’ hands in marriage instead of the youngest. Understandably, Paddy and Mick say no, but offer Willy a deal -- they promise to send back five of their bachelor friends from Ireland to marry the girls if they can take the two youngest with them to Ireland now. Willy, seeing his impending freedom from fatherly fawning, quickly agrees. Paddy and Mick leave with the girls, and a week passes. Then two. Then a month. Then years. (Willy’s not too quick.) Finally, Willy realizes that he’s been had, and so he goes to the town witch to see what she can do for him. “Willy,” she says, “you know there’s nothing I can to directly to them since they’re not in the town anymore. If you can get them to come back, then I can curse them, but not now.”
Willy knew this going in, but when he actually hears it, he breaks down and cries. He’s making quite a fool of himself, sobbing away like a little girl, and the witch finally says, “Go home, Willy, and I’ll think about it tonight and see what I can do.”
He does as she says, and when he wakes up in the morning he sees five new mountains across the way. Puzzled, he goes to the witch who tells him, “I thought long and hard about what to do, and it finally hit me. I’ve frozen your daughters like that to preserve their beauty until their lost loves come back from Ireland. When they do, they’ll be awoken and all will be right.” Sadly, they’re still waiting. Aww... (That’s why they’re known as the Five Sisters of Kintail.)
Now we sing our first authentic Scottish song as we continue rolling on down the road. Just by looking at the chorus you should be able to figure out how much fun this song was: Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low, through the streets in my kilt I go, all the lassies say, “Hello! Donald, where’s your troosers?”
The rest of the song is like that -- just talking about pantsless Donald trying to get with the ladies. Hilarious. As we pass by more forests I notice something interesting -- lots of the trees are covered with this bright white / green looking moss. There are scads of them and they look like someone sprayed them with foam insulation. Apparently it’s some sort of soft lichen / moss that’s indigenous to the area, but it looks really cool; like something out of the Lord of the Rings.
We finally arrive at Loch Ness, that infamous home of Nessie the monster. The Loch itself is the largest freshwater Loch in the UK -- it’s only 1m wide, but it’s 25m long and 250m deep at its most perilous depth. It holds enough water to fill every lake in England and Wales combined and still have some water left over, or enough space to fit the world’s entire population standing up in it ten times over. (Dave comments on the idiots who come up with these numbers -- “How much frigging time do they have on their hands? Too much. Get a real frickin job, ya fairies. Drive a bus like me.” I have to agree.
Now back to Nessie: she’s supposed to be some remnant of the dinosaurs, possibly a plesiosaur, and the first sighting came in the sixth century by St. Columbus, the man who is credited with bringing Catholicism to Scotland. He was trying to cross the Loch, but there was no way across. Finally, he spotted a boat on the other side and had one of his followers swim over to get it (ah, the joys of delegation). When the boy was halfway over, Columbus say a great head rear up behind him and swim towards the boy, its glistening jaws open. Columbus spoke a quick prayer and blessed the great beast, at which point it turned and swam away, disappearing into the peat-stained darkness of the depths below. Ever since, Nessie has never attacked humans and has been spotted only every now and again. Or so the legend goes...
A quick jaunt through the town of Inverness (which means ‘mouth of Ness’) -- or Inver-shnakie as the locals call it, since the Loch winds through town like a “shnake.” (And it is a quick jaunt -- we don’t even get out of the bus, because as Dave says, “This is the home of the ugliest people in the whole country. They’re truly horrible to look at. And to make matters worse, they’ve got the most annoying accent around.” (The best looking people, he says, happen to hail from Ayre, a place Dave just happens to be from. What a card...))
We do stop at Culloden Battlefield (cull-aw-den), the place of the great massacre and the last battle in the UK. What happened was this: The Jacobites were pissed off about their King being ousted, they were really pissed off about Killiecarnie, and they were positively livid about their castle being blown up, so by this point in 1745 they were a hair’s breadth from blowing their stacks. They found a replacement for the current king that they were determined to get on the throne, Bonnie Prince Charles (remember, Bonnie means ‘nice.’ He didn’t have a girl’s name or anything...) So they take their army and march to England, intent on capturing London and overthrowing the King. They’re doing well, capturing cities left and right, but by the time they get near London, to a town called Darby, they have sustained massive losses and are running out of equipment.
So rather than throw themselves on the chopping block, they turn around and run back to Scotland. The bad thing is, the British army numbering roughly 10,000 is chasing them. The Jacobites are elusive, but they just can’t run anymore, so in April of 1746 they stop at Culloden to face their pursuers. It was an army of 9000 well armed Brits facing a tired, poorly equipped band of 5000 Scots. It’s one of the worst places to battle if you’re a fan of the Scots -- it’s flat, covered with thick, prickly brambles, and, as always, covered with patches of water. Despite the odds and the terrain, Prince Charles orders his men to charge, but they’re no match for the government army and are utterly massacred. (Trying to execute the Highland charge on flat land is bad enough, but trying to run through soft mud and brambles is darned near impossible.) 1200 Jacobites are killed in one hour, along with 350 British soldiers.
The battle won, but retribution not yet his, the leader of the Brits, the Duke of Cumberland, orders all men still on the battlefield to be executed. So all the injured or captured are put to death, even his own men, but not with bullets -- that would be wasteful. The Duke of Cumberland (or the Butcher of Cumberland, as he would soon be known) ordered them to be stabbed or clubbed to death. And if that wsn’t enough, he also ordered all the women and children watching to be killed (women and kids came to watch the battles and help the wounded the instant the fighting was done) along with everyone in an eight mile radius.
After this, the English were so pissed at the Highlanders that they decided to try and eradicate them from the face of the Earth. They made it illegal to play the bagpipes, wear tartans, or speak Gaelic -- all thigns that were part of these people’s everyday lieves, and all things that were punishable by being shot on the spot. Southern aristocrats took control of the land and rasied the rents to force all the natives out of their homes, and if this didn’t work, theyy just burned them down Mississippi-style. This forced many to the central belt of the country, the towns of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Glasgow, and those who didn’t come here were put on boats to Canada and the US. The aristocrats replaced the people with sheep to attract new, more desirable people to the land (eveyrone loves sheep). This whole horrible process was called the Higland Clearances and the area has never recovered -- there’s still very few people who live on the land.
Rather than face all these atrocities being placed upon his people, Bonnie Prince Charles decided to get out of Dodge and he fled to France with the aid of Flora MacDonald (she dressed him as a woman and smuggled him out, a feat that earned her legendary status in the area and got her a great, big monument on her grave.)
Our trip almost over, Dave dishes out one more nugget of wisdom regarding a popular Scottish sport -- shinty. This is the predecessor to ice hockey, a sport that came to America and Canada when the people were forced over to our neck of hte woods during the Clearances. It’s played on grass with sticks that look a little like those of lacrosse, and there are twelve men on each side. The ball is a cork ball covered in leather, and it spends more time in the air than on the ground, Dave says, so everyone is endlessly swinging at it. Because of this, most of the shinty players are “damned ugly,” he says. Worse that Elizabeth I, I inquire? “Oh, God no. Nobody’s that ugly. These guys have noses shaped like a saw blade and less teeth than a newborn, but they’re still dead sexy compared to that beast.” A proper closing to the weekend, I think.
