In Alistair Moffat’s new book ‘War Paths’, the writer walks Highland battlefields to explore close up how land and culture helped create clan battle plans and ultimately bled into history.
Glenfinnan, Lewis, Inverlochy, Mulroy, Arisaig and Morar are all amongst the west coast locations Alistair visits, where the influence of topography, songs, heritage and the sense of dùthchas becomes evident.
“It’s important to understand it, to put yourself as best you can in the shoes of people at the time. And that was the value of going to the battlefields: I literally stood where they stood,” Alistair says.
“I went off to all these places to look at the ground, to get a sense of why Dundee did what he did, why Montrose did what he did, why George Murray and the prince did what they did.”
Alistair says that being on the battlefields helped recognise the physical courage that was needed to fight using bladed weapons and the Highland charge, which he stresses was ‘not a crazy melee of ululating savages screaming a language that the red coats didn’t understand.’
“It was actually in reality very disciplined.”
The developer of the charge, Alasdair Mac Colla, is one of the many famous Highland names to appear in the history, with Alistair tracking the clans Cameron, Maclean, MacDonald, and more.
The journey also allowed the Selkirk-based writer to reconnect with the Highlands and islands as he travelled, an experience he describes as ‘wonderful’.
“People think that the Highlands are bleak and there’s no people, and of course when you drive through Glencoe and across Rannoch Moor that’s what you see.
“But I’ve always found the Highlands a place of tremendous warmth, and some of that came back. Seeing people I hadn’t seen for 20 years, it was tremendous.”
Alistair believes the mixture of travel and history, which he also used in recent ‘walking books’ Islands of the Evening and The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads, is a simple format that people enjoy, journeying from A to B through history and geography.
Yet the inspiration to walk through the past was provided to Alistair from a peculiar source far removed from the battlefields: a series of anonymous letters criticising his writing style.
“The last one I got, with a compliment slip from a care home, said: ‘look, you should try to go to the places where history happened. You’ll discover more than simply looking at documentary resources and online and what not.”
“She was basically telling me to get out more,” Alistair laughs.
War Paths by Alistair Moffat is published by Birlinn and available now.