Wednesday 11 June 2014

Battlefield Blues, by Laurie Graham


Last month I visited Culloden Moor, the site of the battle that ended once and for all the Jacobite Rebellion and the Stuarts’ hopes of regaining the throne. It was actually a return visit for me   -  I was first there in 1965, begrudgingly accompanied by a boyfriend whose ideas about how to spend a summer holiday did not accord with mine. The relationship was doomed and trudging across a windswept battlefield can only have hastened its demise.

In 1965 there was no Visitors’ Centre at Culloden. Now there’s a restaurant and a gift shop, an audio-guide, an interactive indoor exhibit, weapon demonstrations (with audience participation), and a slightly nausea-inducing surround sound-and-vision reconstruction of how it might have felt to be in the thick of the battle. Strictly in conformity with health and safety guidelines, I’m sure. Back at our hotel I got into conversation with another guest.

‘Ah yes,’ she sighed. ‘We did Culloden yesterday. Waste of a morning, really. It’s just a moor. But did you try the coffee with Drambuie?’

Is there something perverse in me that preferred Culloden when it truly was ‘just a moor’?

Culloden is a bleak spot on the sunniest of days. On that April morning in 1746 when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men lined up, bellies empty, feet wet,  it must have seemed a particularly hopeless place. The simple grave markers are a reminder of what followed. An hour or two of carnage. Bodies stripped by looters of anything of value and tumbled into mass pits. The pressed Highland clansmen, the Irish and the French in the Jacobite army, and the Duke of Cumberland’s well shod Royalist infantrymen. They were all far from home, whichever cause they died for.

Imagine though if some seer had said to them, ‘in the future, 250 years from now, people will come walking over your grave. “Nothing much to see here” they’ll say, and then they’ll go into a building, over there, to buy a wee teddy bear in a kilt and get a toasted sandwich.’

The disquiet I feel when I visit these places is vaguely akin to what I feel about the way children are taught history today. Modules.  The juicy bits. The marketable elements. They are essentially those episodes of history that can be turned into a field trip. And if it’s just a boring old moor with a few wonky grave markers, never mind. You can always bring home a Battle of Bannockburn baseball cap. Why do they sell Bannockburn merchandise at Culloden? Well, it’s all Scotland isn’t it?  And the gift-wrapped Prosecco and chocolate truffles? No, you’ve got me there. I wonder if it's a big seller?

I was discussing all this with an acquaintance who was involved in the search for the body of Richard III.

‘Baseball caps!’ he said. ‘That’s nothing. You should see what’s going on in Leicester these days. I mean, they lost his body for 400 years, couldn’t have cared less where they’d mislaid him, but now he’s been found they’re using him to sell sunglasses.’

Back in 1965 when Culloden was ‘just a moor’ it affected me profoundly. Here, it seemed to say, terrified men and boys stood in the Scotch drizzle and waited for death.

I wasn’t a historian. I was just a teenager who happened to have read John Prebble’s Fire and Sword trilogy. Would an interactive audio-visual exhibit have helped me to become better informed? Possibly. But would it have diluted and Disneyfied the raw reality of a battlefield? I think it would.

The Drambuie coffee though, I will agree, is very good indeed.

 

 

12 comments:

Petrea Burchard said...

Now I don't feel so bad about my Stonehenge magnet.

How could such sites fail to inspire? Perhaps because there's so much distraction we don't see what's actually there.

michelle lovric said...

Sad, isn't it, when all that interactivity means that there isn't room for the imagination?

Elizabeth Chadwick said...

I totally empathise with your mindset Laurie. I have felt the same at Hastings and at Montsegur. As so often happens history is all about us now rather than us then.

adele said...

Yes agree completely esp about the way History is taught. And yes, tourist stuff at such sites is very odd and disconcerting...but that coffee I have no objection to at all.

Susan Price said...

The Culloden Gift Shop? Get your Crushed Hopes of a People mug. Buy a Butcher Cumberland t-shirt.
But I doubt if history was ever taught except by running through 'the juicy bits.' That was the joke of '1066 And All That' - all of British history that's memorable.

It's almost like a test of interest. You have to be committed enough to get past the teddy bears in kilts and Henry 6th's eight wives before you can learn the real stuff.

Alison Morton said...

The battlefield at Cannae in Italy is 'just a plain' overlooked by a cliff with ruins of a medieval village. But half-close your eyes, take a deep breath and go into relax mode. You won't be relaxed for very long as the noise and sheer carnage of Hannibal annihilating the flower of the Roman Army assaults all your senses.
Well, that's what it did for me.

For others, it was just the plain with market gardens.

Nice visitor centre, though.

Alison Morton said...

The battlefield at Cannae in Italy is 'just a plain' overlooked by a cliff with ruins of a medieval village. But half-close your eyes, take a deep breath and go into relax mode. You won't be relaxed for very long as the noise and sheer carnage of Hannibal annihilating the flower of the Roman Army assaults all your senses.
Well, that's what it did for me.

For others, it was just the plain with market gardens.

Nice visitor centre, though.

Katherine Langrish said...

It's not just long-ago history either. I don't know if you saw the furore about the gift shop at the new World Trade Centre memorial museum? There you can buy 9/11 coffee mugs and teeshirts, or - perhaps the most tasteless? - a breadboard shaped like a map of the USA, with 3 little hearts where the three planes went down.

How could anyone even think it up?

http://nypost.com/2014/05/18/outrage-over-911-museum-gift-shops-crass-souvenirs/

Mefinx said...

Very well said. i learned more about the aftermath of World War 1 reading Helen Dunmore's 'the Lie' in West Cornwall than from any of these packaged theme park sites.

Derek Birks said...

Whilst I share your misgivings about the way such sites are marketed - and, as an ex-history teacher, don't even get me started about how history is taught - nevertheless, I would say that without such revenues as are gathered in this way, it might not be possible to visit some sites at all. I do find it useful to have good information on site - at least as a starting point. I don't find many interactive experiences rewarding but I know that many young people do. We all have different ways into exploring sites. If you are blessed with a great imagination and a little knowledge that might be enough but if you have neither, what is provided - albeit sometimes in a tacky way! - might help you to get a feel of the place.

Becca McCallum said...

Having worked at a historic site for many years (okay, 3) I can definitely see where the woman who said 'it's just a moor' is coming from.

The heritage school of thought that 'less is more' does work for some people - for interested, imaginative, informed people. Other people will see 'just a moor', 'just a heap of stones', 'just a cottage.'

At my place of work, we have a large, modern, interactive museum with audio, visual and so on at one end of the site, and a tiny, four roomed cottage with no interpretation at the other.

Some people walk through the cottage in 4 minutes flat. Others spend an hour or so, wandering around, looking at things, having conversations about how they might have lived there.

Anyway, this is rambling, so I'll wrap up: if those that see 'just a moor' at first can, with a bit of interpretive help, get an idea of what us imaginative people see in our heads all the time, then that's great!

However, some people are clearly just there for the tea and scone, and the tartan teddy bear.

Ruan Peat said...

Best Place I like to go is Mary Anne's Cottage at Dunnet Head, every time I get a different person who knows different things about the place, http://www.caithnessandsutherland.com/mary-ann-cottage-caithness-croft-museum/ the place has no interactive boards and is as it was, and yes some folk take 10 minutes and leave, I tend to take half a day, and alsway leave feeling I have learnt more. Well worth a visit if you ever get that far north.