Inside the Culloden museum …
As brevity is the soul of wit, I hope for once to please here that way. Over on my Austen reveries blog I told of my months of effort towards a paper on Culloden and the highland clearances as a crossroads of existence for so many: and that I finally focused on Naomi Mitchison’s masterpiece of a historical novel, The Bull Calves, written over 1941-47, set over two days in June, 1747, not far from Inverness, and the 1994 indie movie, Chasing the Deer, which adds a moving human story and the beauty of Scotland and another sophisticated interpretation of what was Jacobitism: well, I delivered said paper in a session on Jacobitism: Then and Now, at the recent EC/ASECS conference at Gettysburg, and have put the paper on my site at academia.edu.
Here it is: At this Crossroads of my Life: books & movies about Culloden and Its Aftermath.
Do read it, gentle reader, and if you have time or are so disposed, send comments, suggestions, thoughts for future reading and watching.
This is not a trailer advertisement, but a promotional reel made to attract funding for Chasing the Deer (first aired on Grampian TV)
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
ON the historiography of the transformation of the battlefield and new museum, see “The Graves of the Gallant Highlanders”: Memory, Interpretation and Narratives of Culloden by John R. and Margaret M. Gold, History and Memory , 19:1 (Spring/Summer 2007):5-38
A fascinating article, thank you. And I’ll keep an eye open for ‘Chasing the Deer’. I get cross with the nutty inaccurate narrative that the whole thing was a Scotland v England affair, which, in turn, feeds division even today. The last time I was at Culloden, I walked from the Jacobite lines to the Government, imagining what it must have been like, and felt intense anger at Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose selfish ambitions led so many – who would hardly have benefited had he won – to their deaths. Ultimately, there was – and is – nothing romantic about Jacobitism. As for ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, today he would have been tried as a war criminal.
I agree.
Here is my account of my visit to Culloden museum and battlefield with a group of Road Scholars from Aigas House (managed by John Lister-Kaye and his wife, “Lady” Lucy:
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2017/09/01/scottish-highlands-tour-from-aigas-house-historical-archeaological-caledonian-foresttownandcountryorwomenswork/
E.M.
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