Welcome to your Gory Bed or to Victor-eee

by - 15:58 on 07 March 2008

Moody, atmospheric, haunted. Note to self: must go to see the new Culloden Visitor Centre. But what about other battlefields? There are plenty to choose from in Scotland.

Picture the scene. It is June 1314 and King Robert I of Scotland is surveying the landscape near Stirling. He is sometimes called Robert the Bruce, cf ‘Elizabeth the Windsor’. 

The King purses his lips. He is troubled. Stirling Castle is on the horizon. It’s the last castle still occupied by the English and if King Robert wins the coming battle, he gets to keep it. But it’s mid-June and hot. There’s a cloud of dust rising up from 20,000 English soldiers who are not best pleased at having to defend it and march into Scotland under their king, Edward the, uhmm, Plantagenet. (Look, I’m not on safe ground with the English history, OK?)

Anyway, Robert fingers his battleaxe. He’s already a bit sweaty under the chain mail. He’s got the pits dug. Likewise, he has the all-important calthrops in place; nasty little devices with upward pointing spikes strewn on the ground and intended to lame a horse, because he’s really worried about the enemy heavy cavalry.

I just wish that at some point he had turned to his faithful (but getting nervous) PR advisor who would have said something like:

‘Sire, the knights are fair drawing in. And this ground is most favourable for skewering yon cavalry like armoured kebabs. But around seven hundred years from now, it will be far from picturesque in terms of the visitor centre that the National Trust for Scotland will have built there. For lo, it will be zoned as housing and, well, not very pretty and slightly industrial. My lord, yon Trossachy looking mountains will essay your purpose better. Their lofty spaces serve the turning of a tour bus with greater ease’.

But King Robert replied: ‘Forsooth, my trusty PR person, I pay you all this money every month and you’re only telling me this now? And not even a mention in the Stirling Observer? Now’s the day and now’s the hour. So get the ‘Chains and Slaver-eee’ press release out pronto. And after this, I’m handling my own account.’

And so the king turned to his military experts and won a great victory. Nobody seems quite sure of the exact setting of some of the battle incidents that took place on the river-terraces and fields of what is now the mostly built-over outskirts of Stirling, though there’s some awesomely intelligent material on  www.battlefieldstrust.com/media/672.pdf  

Finally, after many other battles and few victories, there was Culloden, 432 years later, the last battle fought in Scotland, in a civil war that split families and saw more Scots fight for the government side than join BP Charlie’s outfit. More on this after I visit and have the real battlefield experience on this most atmospheric of battlefields near Inverness. For the moment remember that, though Charlie lost, the Jacobites had magnificent PR people, in the days when shortbread tin-lid illustrations were the new media.

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