Tea & Whiskers: Culloden Battlefield

This is an experience I haven't ever really talked about, as I have never really had the chance to share it with people. Then I realised - well - it would be the perfect thing to write about on the blog.

So, today, I want to tell you all the story about the day I visited Culloden Battlefield in Scotland.

My heart has always been lost to the stories and history of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland - but Scotland - Scotland in particular has my soul. It is like a home I do not know, a land I wish to return to, but cannot. At night, I sometimes dream of wandering its Highlands, through the mist and the rain, and finding the peace I seek there. Often I wonder if this homesickness for a land I do not yet know, is God calling me through the mire and confusion of the World, and so I seek it in my dreams. Perhaps Scotland is just how my mind has evoked such imagery.

Before I tell you what happened that day, it is worth knowing some of the history, because Culloden is just some field in Scotland - it is a wound in time. Culloden was the final, terrible clash of the Jacobite Uprising in 1745. The Jacobite's sided with Prince Charles Edward Stuart (or Bonnie Prince Charlie), who at the time was hoping to reclaim the British Throne for the exiled House of Stuart. The battle itself didn't last very long. It was, in truth, a slaughter of the Jacobite army, and to be honest, it wasn't just a slaughter - it was the tearing apart of a culture, a way of life and living, as after the battle, Highland culture was utterly suppressed.

I hate to think about it. I hate thinking about the erasure of culture, of languages, of people...

When I was younger, and I went on my trip to Scotland, I will admit, I was ignorant of a lot of the background surrounding the Battlefield I wandered through. Indeed, I learnt most of the information I just explained after my experience at Culloden. I stepped off the tour bus with a very vague notion that this was a mass graveyard, and so, I headed out into the field on my crutches.

Yes. I was on crutches. That's another story.

My tour group split up. We only had an hour, and everyone seemed rather bored, but I was determined to find the gravestone of the Maclean Clan. So I wandered the field on my own, searching the grave stones...

And then I found it.

The Macleans.

They were grouped together with several other clans.

I hung there, on my crutches, staring at this stone and suddenly I burst into tears.

What I experienced that day - and have never again experienced - is rather inexpressible. I'd never really been an overly spiritual person, in fact I had probably gone out of my way to avoid such things, not wanting to confuse myself. But here I was, suddenly on my knees - my crutches fallen away - and I was filled with this overwhelming, indescribable grief for people long since gone, and I did not even know why. Like I said, it was only after this experience that I went and I did research.

It felt like I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. I was there, on the ground, completely overcome by this immense, relentless waves of grief. It was terrifying. Like being swallowed by a compressive blanket, and unable to crawl out.

Then, gradually, it all just faded away.

I could move again.

I was on the cold, damp grass, and the blue sky was above me and everything was okay. I wasn't being crushed, and I wasn't lost to an all-consuming darkness. I was still alive.

I grappled up my crutches and hobbled back to the bus.

I must have looked a right old state, as the tour bus director asked me if I was alright and I tried to laugh it off with a smile.

I rather felt in a bit of shock for a long while afterwards.

Some places stay with you, like echoes, years later, still reverberating in your soul. Culloden is one such place for me. I still wander that field, I feel myself there, from time to time, and I deeply long to return. I don't pretend to understand what happened to me that day, only that God met me somewhere in the stillness, and He has never left.

I loved this hat.