Culloden Battlefield

On April 16, 1746, on boggy moorland east of Inverness, the exhausted and hungry Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart — “Bonnie Prince Charlie” — met the government army of the Duke of Cumberland. After a punishing artillery bombardment, the Highlanders charged into point-blank musket fire and grapeshot. The battle lasted less than an hour. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jacobites were killed or wounded, many during the pursuit, against about 50 government dead. Many wounded men were killed where they lay, and the brutal suppression of the Highlands that followed earned Cumberland the name “Butcher.” Culloden was the last pitched battle fought on British soil and the end of the Jacobite risings.

The Jacobite dead lay on the moor for days before being buried in mass graves, grouped roughly by clan. In 1881 the local landowner Duncan Forbes raised a memorial cairn and the headstones that still mark the clan graves on either side of the road across the field. The National Trust for Scotland cares for the site today; its visitor center opened in 2007, and red and blue flags mark the two front lines.

Culloden’s ghosts are the ghosts of grief. Folklore says birds fall silent over the clan graves and heather will not grow on them. Visitors tell of the clash of swords and cries carried on the wind, a lone piper, and especially of ghostly soldiers on the anniversary of the battle — among them a wounded Highlander in tartan lying on the ground, and a tall, gaunt figure who murmurs “defeated” to passersby. A much-repeated story, of uncertain origin, has a visitor lifting a tartan cloth draped on a grave mound to find a dead Highlander beneath it. Older tradition adds the “Great Scree,” a huge black bird said to have been seen by the Jacobite general Lord George Murray on the eve of the battle as an omen of doom.

These stories are better documented as tradition than as dated sightings; even Scottish newspapers file the anniversary ghosts among the scare stories that “do the rounds” each April. But for many visitors, especially descendants of the clans, the moor’s power needs no ghosts at all.

Sounds of battle — clashing steel, cries and gunfire — a phantom piper, apparitions of Highland soldiers, a wounded man in tartan, a tall figure whispering “defeated,” silent birds, and the omen bird known as the Great Scree.

The clan graves along the old road across the moor, the Well of the Dead where the chief of the MacGillivrays is said to have fallen, the memorial cairn and Leanach Cottage. Reports cluster around April 16 and at dusk or in mist.

Culloden is central to Jacobite song and memory, to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, and to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels and TV series, which brought a new wave of visitors. An annual commemoration is held near the anniversary.