It was the last battle fought on British soil, and its outcome determined the future of the newly formed United Kingdom and its fledgling empire. However, the land around the Culloden battlefield near Inverness is now under threat – from spreading housing estates and other developments.
As a result, historians and archaeologists have launched a campaign aimed at promoting protection for the site where Britain’s last civil war had ended on 16 April 1746, when Jacobite troops attacked. Bonnie Prince Charlie was decisively defeated by an army of government soldiers.
Researchers supported by the National Trust Scotland (NTS), which owns and manages a significant portion of the Culloden Battlefield, has undertaken a series of excavations to establish the exact boundaries of the battlefield and explore in more detail how the conflict unfolded. .
“We know where the fighting took place in hand-to-hand combat, but there were other important maneuvers and encounters in the area,” said Catriona McIntosh, estate manager at Culloden Battlefield. “If we can detect these, we’ll be better able to defend the area.”
The Battle of Culloden marked the end of the Jacobite rise in 1745, an attempt by Charles Edward Stuart to regain the British throne for his father, James, who in turn was the son of the deposed monarch, James II of England. The Jacobites won their opening battle of the campaign, but after returning from a brief invasion of England, they met government troops with a new British commander, the Duke of Cumberland. He devised new tactics to combat the Jacobites at Culloden – including special training with bayonets.
Cumberland also had a large army: 8,800 soldiers among the Jacobites’ 6,000, men who were also exhausted after attempting – and then aborting – a surprise attack on the government troops’ camp the night before the battle.
“There are many puzzles about the battle, including the fact that government troops are prepared to face the southeast,” said Culloden’s operations manager, Raoul Curtis-Machin. “Strategically, you would have expected them to face east.
“However, recent research, including laser-ranging techniques, suggests that these soldiers were avoiding an area that was then treacherously marshy – it was not drained long after the war – and this affected their deployment.” The present excavations would seem to support this view.”
Such conditions would also have affected the Jacobites’ ability to charge their enemy lines, a preferred technique for them. However, these face-to-face tactics would have been set in the mud that was Culloden Moor at the time.
Derek Alexander, head of archeology at the NTS, said, “We see from our research that government troops would have been very well drilled and could maneuver quickly, something that Cumberland was working on very carefully. “
Research has shown that each government soldier was ordered not to pat his bayonet on the person in front of him, but on the exposed underarm of his right-hand trooper, for example. The result of these tactics was a battle that lasted only 60 minutes and resulted in the slaughter of a large number of Jacobite soldiers.
“We know that 60 government soldiers were killed on the field and 200 more were killed later,” Mackintosh said. “In contrast, about 1,500 Jacobites died either the day after or the day of their wounds. Thus the death ratio of the Jacobites was about 5 to 1. It was very one-sided.”
The battlefield commemorates this horrific slaughter and marks a turning point in British history. However, the site is now suffering as it is being heavily encroached upon by housing schemes. “For example, just next to the Culloden Battlefield Memorial Cairn you can see Viewhill Estate, where 16 five-bed executive homes have been built,” Curtis-Machin said. “This is a completely inappropriate development for this scenario.
“The problem surrounds us by planning applications for further development on land on all six sides of Culloden. If this sort of thing continues, we will come in and start looking like Central Park in Manhattan. .
“And that would be wrong. Placing something that is so out of place makes it incredibly difficult to experience history in a meaningful way.”
After the Battle of Culloden ended, Prince Charles fled and fled for five months before fleeing Scotland for France in September 1746. He never returned and died in Rome in 1788, a broken drunk without an heir. The fate of Britain and its fledgling empire would have been very different.
Curtis-Machin said, “A Stuart monarchy might have a very different view of Britain’s colonies, and so we might not have the American Revolution.” “Likewise, the Highland Scots who suffered during this” approval, which had intensified dramatically after the war, would not have been forced to emigrate to Canada and other parts of the world. Culloden made a big difference to the world and we must accept that.”