Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other

by Sam Heughan

The Romans didn’t think much of these savages so they built a vast stone wall – Hadrian’s – in 122 AD to keep these brutes away from their designer togas and Gucci sunglasses.

Around the time of the marauding Vikings, Kenneth MacAlpin, the first king of Scotland, united the Kingdom of Scotland in 843 AD. Also at this time, the Highland clans were emerging (although the majority of clans cannot be authenticated until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries).

Clans had more to do with survival in a harsh land full of tumult rather than race or nationality. Members organised themselves around a ‘chieftain’, a territorial leader ruling over classless free men of equal rights. (There were slaves but these were never from the tribe, just some poor unfortunates they rounded up.)

The clans lived in ‘black houses’, many built of turf, not stone.

However, by the sixteenth century clan life had begun to change. Marriage alliances became a means of strengthening political pacts and consolidating wealth and power. There were no elections to chiefdom, common ownership continued to survive, but now they levied increasing rent and class structures began to appear.

1300–1600 were some of the most violent years in the Highlands during what became known as the Clan Wars – tribal gangs feuding and generally knocking seven bells out of one another in a mafia style, governed by codes of absolute loyalty, respect and honour.

When William Wallace started a revolt against Edward I in 1297, brilliantly brought to life by Mel Gibson’s epic movie Braveheart, Scotland was ruled by (King) Robert the Bruce, a supporter of the Wallace Uprising. Robert ‘the badass’ Bruce went on to famously defeat the English army at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), securing Scotland as an independent and sovereign kingdom.

And so we come to the House of Stuart (the same family as Bonnie Prince Charlie) which came to the throne in 1371, ruling Scotland for three centuries with James VI inheriting the English throne as well, becoming James I of England, in 1603. Then there’s the bit in the middle where Charles I (also a Stuart) is beheaded in the midst of the chaos of the English Civil War in 1649. Oliver Cromwell presides as Lord Protector until the Scots proclaim Charles II (a sequel Stuart) King of Scotland, which makes Cromwell raging mad and leads to several bloody battles in the ‘Scottish Campaign’, including the Battle of Worcester, after which Charles II is deposed. However, Charles II leads another Stuart comeback in 1660 and is restored to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland and all is well again. Until it’s James VII’s (James II of England) turn to mess everything up again by converting to Catholicism, which gets the English Protestants’ knickers in a twist, so they depose him in 1688 and install first cousins from the House of Hanover, William and Mary, meaning inbreeding was totally fine just so long as they weren’t Catholics! James VII (II of England) flees to France and tries to return by invading Ireland but loses the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and spends the rest of his life in France, living off Louis XIV.

In a nutshell this ‘Glorious Revolution’ of sectarianism, king nobbling and incest goes down like a shite sandwich in Scotland, and it leads directly to the first Jacobite Rising of 1689 and subsequent unrest, as those ‘loyal to Jacob’ (Hebrew for James) are determined to put a Stuart king back on the throne and keep Scotland independent. The 1707 Act of Union, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain, further inflames the Jacobites,

In the Battle of the Field of Shirts (Blàr na Léine, Kinloch-Lochy) in 1544 they removed their plaid altogether and tied their shirts between their legs before running into battle because it was an unusually hot day! Fought by Clan MacDonald of Clanranald, assisted by their cousins the Camerons, against the Frasers and Clan Grant, there were 800 men at the start of the battle. By the end, only thirteen men were left standing.

‘People tend to think it was a Campbell–MacDonald thing but it was more about the government trying to make an example of a small clan so they could stop posting troops to a costly garrison in the Highlands and relocate their soldiers to conflicts in Europe,’ says Derek. The idea was to get the clans to sign an oath of allegiance and those who didn’t (who refused or were too slow) were to be made an example of with the ‘utmost extremity of the law’.

Highlanders were regarded by Lowlanders as an obstacle in the way of the complete political union between England and Scotland. Many believed that their independence of spirit had to be broken.’

Gillebride explains, ‘The Highlanders and Islanders would have spoken Gaelic all the way up until the mid-eighteenth century and the language differences, as well as the geographical dislocation, would have fuelled differences.’

After Culloden, the British tried to eradicate the Gaelic language and the Highland culture, such as the wearing of Highland dress and all weapons. ‘They tried to assimilate the people (the High-landers) into another form of culture, which has historically happened in many parts of the world.’ The Clearances, road building and other factors all took their toll, diluting language and culture; however, miraculously (and with lots of effort, education and funding), Highland culture lives on and is in fact thriving with 70,000 Gaelic speakers registered in Scotland. ‘With the fluent speakers tending to live in the Highlands and islands,’ says Gillebride. ‘In part the culture has survived thanks to storytelling,’ explains Gillebride. ‘One thing that we did when I was growing up was go to a ceilidh house. We now think of a ceilidh as a dance but the Gaelic word means “to go visiting” and when you’re visiting you tell a story, sing a song and if the gathering is going well, at three in the morning you might have a dance in the kitchen.’ So essentially a ceilidh was a social visit, encompassing storytelling, music, dance and of course, whisky.

More often than not it’s about hanging in there to achieve your goal and the harder it gets, sometimes, the nearer you are – just like with marathons. You have to keep on keeping on.

IRN BRU – impossible to describe the taste but the Scots swear by it for a hangover. When they tried to change the recipe and make it more healthy with less sugar, there was a national outcry.

Loch Ness is one of those iconic places that carries with it a wonderful sense of myth and mystery. And it’s just so big. It overwhelms you with its grandeur, and even though your rational mind tells you that there can’t be a Loch Ness Monster, part of my brain is thinking, Maybe today . . . maybe today I will see it.

The key thing for the Gaels was relationship to the land; it wasn’t about who owned the land, it was that the land owned them. They lived in the land so the whole idea of ownership was something altogether different.

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

thought of that while riding my bike. Albert Einstein on the Theory of Relativity

The day has finally dawned and we are travelling to Drumossie Moor, site of the Battle of Culloden, which, on 16th April 1746, signalled the end of Highland culture and the decimation of the clan system.

The Jacobite Rising of 1745 was a brief episode in British history, only nine months, from the raising of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s standard at Glenfinnan to the battle that ended his hopes at Culloden. In an age when the army was a gentleman’s occupation, there were few who really knew what they were doing in the Jacobite camp. Lord George Murray was one. MacDonald of Keppoch was another, along with Cluny MacPherson (who had practically been pressed into service by Cameron of Lochiel) and yet they took control of Scotland.

Murray did his best to create a decent army, but on the eve of the Battle of Prestonpans (17th September 1745) no one knew how they’d perform. It’s extraordinary to think that when they charged out of the mist and caught the raw British troops unawares, for most of the 2,500 Highlanders this was their first battle. Victorious at Prestonpans, no one can doubt the Jacobites’ courage, but we also shouldn’t doubt their luck. At Prestonpans they didn’t face disciplined artillery fire using canister shot (similar to a giant shotgun being fired at close range). The victory swelled numbers in Charles’s army to 5,500 men intent on marching to London and crowning their ‘true king’ but the rebels’ artillery was rubbish and they didn’t have enough cavalry to mount a single charge. The Highland Charge made up for this to a great extent. Who needs cavalry when you have hundreds of screaming Highlanders brandishing their fearsome broadswords and targes? They were the ‘shock’ troops of their age, especially trained to carry out sudden assaults. By the time they reached Falkirk on 17th January 1746, they had learned how to fire a withering volley of musket fire into the charging horsemen of General Hawley, adding the Battle of Falkirk Muir to their battle honours. When they crossed the border into England they were met by much support – the ringing of bells, lighting of bonfires and people illuminating their houses to welcome them at Manchester. The Jacobite numbers continued to swell (alt...

The Battle of Culloden was won by a British army and not an English one. The same British army that went on to win celebrated victories throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and right through the early nineteenth century, culminating in Waterloo. No fewer than four of the sixteen infantry battalions were Scottish, and there were plenty of Scottish officers as well as rank and file standing in the notionally English battalions too.

The rebel front line is in disarray. ‘You want a Highland Charge to be released at the same time so it impacts at the same time,’ explains Catriona. ‘So the north needed to charge first, with the south waiting to accommodate the north’s position further back. What actually happens is after twenty minutes of sustained cannon fire, the men at the southern end want to go so they run and the line is broken.’ Once they start the charge it takes them only a couple of minutes to cover the 450-metre distance.

The 700 rebels who break through soon find themselves encircled by soldiers led by General ‘Hangman’ Hawley and James Wolfe (of Quebec fame, of which more later!) and within two or three minutes all are dead or injured, including Frasers, McTavishes and McIntoshes (from Catriona’s family).

At that precise moment the battle is over. The Jacobite retreat is sounded and the government army chases the rebels all the way to Inverness. In the sixty-minute battle, and the three days that follow, at least 1,500 Jacobites die. British government casualties are only counted as those that arose from the sixty minutes of battle and number fifty, but the mass grave discovered at the battlefield suggests the number is more like seventy-five.

The McTavishes are listed as finally surrendering in Inverness on 17th May 1746, almost exactly a month after the battle. One can only imagine what they went through for those thirty-one days. Evading government troops, hiding where they could, until, like so many others, starvation forced them to surrender.

Battle of Culloden marks the decimation of the Highland clans and their way of life and is a pivotal moment for Scotland. Only four years later (1750–1860), a silent revolution began in the Highlands (and later the Lowlands) as the ‘cottars’, who lived in cottages and farmed small lots of land, and tenant farmers were forcibly evicted to make way for sheep. Undoubtedly a part of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions happening across Europe, many historians feel it was also a form ethnic cleansing of the pugnacious Highlanders who had been a thorn in the side to all invaders or powers who tried to quell or subjugate them. John Prebble in Glencoe writes, ‘The Highland people were once the majority of Scotland’s population, a military society that had largely helped to establish and maintain her monarchy. This society, tribal and feudal, could not change itself to meet a changing world, nor did it wish to.’ During the ‘Clearances’ it’s estimated that 70,000 people left the Western Highlands and Isles between 1760 and 1803, although no one can be sure as many left no record of their departure. Overcrowding and repeated famines hit the ‘crofters’ (formerly farmers) left behind who were unable to work the land that had been communally shared for generations; the land was now owned by landlords and lairds running estates as businesses, which were expected to turn a profit. Around the time of the Scottish Potato Famine (1846–56) the Highlands lost one third of their populati...

Contrary to popular belief, Gaelic wasn’t banned after Culloden (as it has been in 1616). Instead, there was a continual creeping death caused by British educational policy (making English the first language) and a unity between (unequal) trading partners who needed to conduct business in the international language of trade: English. Catriona explains the only way the Highlanders could start to get certain freedoms back was to assimilate or join the British army in order to protect what was left of their culture. So that’s exactly what happened and it explains why General James Woolf, aged nineteen, was fighting the Highlanders on the British side at Culloden, but only twelve years later was to fall mortally wounded into the arms of a Fraser Highlander on the Heights of Abraham after taking Quebec. A regiment of 1,500 Fraser Highlanders (the 78th Regiment) had been raised by the clan and sent to America to fight alongside the British, helping to win Canada for George II.

As with Glencoe, the Jacobite Risings are a fantastic example of how history can be perverted. There are some incontrovertible facts. It did mark the end of Highland culture. Atrocities against the local populace were committed by the Crown. But beyond that, it becomes a matter of perspective. The love of the underdog, particularly in Scottish culture (just look at our football team!), leads to a romantic view of Jacobitism. The handsome prince trying to reclaim his homeland. The skirl of the pipes, brave Highlanders plunging to their deaths. But perhaps we should ask, what would Britain have been like if Charlie boy had won at Culloden?

the MacGregor clan were actually all outlawed. Named ‘Children of the Mist’, for nearly two centuries the clan members were persecuted. Male members were not allowed to use their surname, own property or even possess a wife. Women could be branded and their children given away. Stripped bare, whipped and possibly sold into slavery, their heads could be sold to the government to attain pardon for various misdemeanours. A currency, so to speak. The site of a mass execution of MacGregors in Edinburgh at the St Giles Kirk still holds the Heart of Midlothian, a mosaic that it is still customary to spit on as you pass, much to the bemusement of passing tourists.

Very few people were, in fact, warriors, most scratching out a living with a stick, dealing with high rates of infant mortality, and a pre-industrialised society. The Highlands before 1746 were, in many ways, a society frozen in time, with more in common with the Middle Ages than with the Age of Enlightenment. But I believe a Highlander travelling through the stones today would be shocked. He would see a weakening in our society, both individually and collectively (this is after all a culture that despised a man for making a pillow from ice). The clan system had many faults but older members of the community were respected, honour was a real thing, as was personal responsibility. The clan chiefs did lead their men into the mouths of those cannon at Culloden. This is not something I can imagine any leader doing now. They also understood history. Oral history, but history nonetheless. They revered their past and used it to educate and inspire themselves. In many ways, despite high levels of illiteracy, they were more ‘educated’ than we are today. They knew their world intimately and understood the value of what was before their eyes, without the need to covet other lands – except of course the Campbells! Indeed the Campbells represented the new Scotland, the outward-looking country, a land of commerce and of the ‘law’ – two areas Scotland has always excelled in. If they represented one direction for Scotland, Jacobitism represented another. Who is to say which is better? Sad...

In spite of all our gadgets, medicine and amazing scientific advancement, many of us have no real sense of dualchas (of belonging to a landscape) and seem farther away from feeling part of the world in which we live. The trees and animals are of the world but somehow we are not.