Viaduct, with cows

Cows ignoring a marvel of 19th century Scottish engineering, the Culloden viaduct, outside Inverness.

To be fair, they may have just been wondering how Mairi over there managed to grow her head out of  her shoulder. (These aren't particularly hairy cows, but it's still sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the next one begins -- those two cows merge together so perfectly I had to enlarge the picture several times to figure out what I was looking at. Click to enlarge and you'll see what I mean.)

I hate to cast aspersions on any creature, but I'm fairly certain that Flora, over there on the other end, has never wondered much about anything. Even for a cow, she doesn't look all that bright.

Heather

Heather on the field at Culloden.

Seen from a distance, on a mountainside, heather looks almost reddish-brown. Under gray skies in a light rain, the purples stretch on forever.

Sunday bird blogging

A pied wagtail fleeing into the grass at Culloden yesterday. They're always dashing away, so I don't think it thought it was being followed, but apparently at Culloden you never know.

In which I maybe meet a ghost

They say the Highlands are haunted, and if ghosts are anywhere, they'd be here, at Culloden. In April, on the anniversary of the battle, you can allegedly hear the fighting, and there's a ghost of a man in Highland dress that many people have reported seeing.

I didn't encounter anything that cinematic, but I did have a very strange experience while I was walking around the battlefield. Someone was following me, but there wasn't anyone there.

As you can tell from the pictures, it's mostly moor, crisscrossed by paths, and while there were other visitors braving the rain, I was alone most of the time. Except that I didn't feel alone -- I'd be standing in the path taking a picture and hurrying because there was someone behind me waiting to pass, but when I turned around there wasn't anyone there.

This happened several times, but I didn't really think about it. Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye, something flapping, like a coat caught in the wind. I stopped, turned around, and of course there was nothing and nobody there.

I told myself it was just my shadow, that the sun was probably starting to peek through, though it was still drizzling. And when it happened again, I firmly repeated, It's just my shadow. Again, It's just my shadow.

Finally, I stopped and looked for the sun, which was dimly visible, and found my shadow, which was there but very faint. The only problem was that it was on my left, while whatever I had been seeing was on my right. And whatever it was, it followed me all the way back to the visitor's centre.

I wasn't afraid, which was maybe the least likely part of the whole episode. I was spooked, absolutely, and had a serious case of the creepy-crawlies, but I didn't feel menaced in any way. Whatever, whoever, it was didn't mean me any harm, and I figured if it was a ghost, it had far more business stomping around moors in the rain than I did.

Later, back in the cafe in the visitor's centre, I had a blissfully hot cup of tea, and tried to convince myself that it was one of those optical illusions, where the brain helpfully converts random information supplied by the eyes into something familiar -- a face, a figure, a coat blowing in the wind. But I'd thought there was someone behind me long before I saw anything, and that's something I can't quite explain away.

Names of the fallen

Culloden

The battlefield at Culloden -- site of the defeat of the Jacobite rebels in 1746, the last battle fought on British soil -- is less than an hour by bus from Inverness. The good weather having fled, probably for good, it was windy and chilly, with unenthusiastic, off-and-on rain, but the moody skies were much more appropriate to such a a sad, bloody place than bright sunshine would have been.

There's a very good visitor's centre that explains the background as well as the logistics of the battle. It wasn't just Catholic Highlanders versus the Protestant English, and where you stood on the Divine Right of Kings not to be deposed as the Stuarts had been; many of the Jacobites were Protestant as well (though Presbyterian rather than Anglican), and many Scots, both Lowlander and Highlander, supported King George over the Bonnie Prince. England's ongoing issues with the French contributed as well; Charles Stuart spent much of his time before landing in Scotland trying to persuade the French to invade.

The rebels were undefeated; they had taken Edinburgh and almost taken London before -- inexplicably -- turning back. But bad luck and bad decisions brought them here, to a marshy moor on a brutally cold windy day, with an ill-provisioned army that had neither eaten nor slept facing English cannon.

It was over in less than an hour. The aftermath was brutal; the wounded were bayonetted where they lay. Those who could stand were shot. And the Highland way of life was over, with even the wearing of tartan outlawed.

Today it's a wide moor surrounded by farms, covered in shrubs and heather, with little sign of its tragic history except for the headstones marking the mass graves of those who died there.