The Time, the Tide and the Outlands...

Dear Juliet

Time and tide...

I thought it best to be nostalgic today. Just show you another part of the world, very far away.

Glenfinnan.

It's famous for several things, but not me. I'm sandwiched obscurely in between Bonnie Prince Charlie and J. K. Rowling, but that's not such a bad place to be.

I stayed with cousins in Corpach, adjacent to Fort William, West Highlands ca. 1974, got my first Star Trek novelisation at the local Co-op (I've actually still got it) and saw the bedroom Bonnie Prince Charlie slept in at a country house called Fassfern the night he arrived on the shores of Loch Shiel in 1745. He'd raised the Standard there that day (19th August) and was apparently made Charles VIII and III (this is based on the Union of the Crowns in 1603 which predated the Acts of Union in 1707) although accounts vary.

The Jacobite Rising ended in terrible failure and slaughter at Culloden, but was more a conflict between the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover than between the English and the Scots.

The Legend of John Macnab sums it up like this:

Pursued north towards Inverness by the Duke of Cumberland at the head of an army which included the Glasgow Regiment and the Argyll Militia, Charlie made his last stand at Culloden in 1746, near the site of the fort of Craig Phádraig where Columba had faced Brude in 580. It was there that the beginning and the end of the road was reached, and it was there that the starving clansmen of the House of Stuart fell before the disciplined army of the House of Hanover.

The men of Clan Chattan had come to stand with their prince. The Grants, the Frasers, the Chisholms and the MacLeods also stood. With them were the men of the small clans and lastly the common men: Carmichaels, McColls, Livingstones and MacLeays. Brave men one and all, but when Cumberland turned his cannon upon them, the Highlanders could only charge into a hell of musketry and grape-shot, the survivors staggering on to skewer themselves on three ranks of bayonets.

Much as Sir Godfrey's militia had looted the monastery of Deer, Cumberland earned the nickname ‘Butcher’ by destroying the clans, leaving over a thousand dead at Culloden and putting the Highlands to fire and sword. Then came the Clearances, emptying the glens and scattering the Highlanders to the four winds. Some surviving clansmen who knew nothing except the use of a claymore joined the very army that had broken them.

Outlander is based around Culloden, and I went there once.

I found Glenfinnan in 1981, went there now and then ever after that, met a local girl I might have married but she was not of like mind, and eventually wrote Macnab around it. I discovered a lot of Scotland as a result, including standing stones like these at Dunadd.

All that and more led to Macnab.

I went back in 2025, intending to sit solitary in the sleeping car thinking literary thoughts but with my usual luck the weather was magnificent and I explored the local area a little more.

Got a few good pictures, one of a shoreline which rivalled Point Lobos!

Okay, time is pressing ever onwards so I'll drop this blog in sharpish and I hope you have a good day.

Love,

James