Culloden Battlefield

Culloden Battlefield occupies Drummossie Moor four miles east of Inverness. On 16 April 1746 the Government army of the Duke of Cumberland, around 8,000 regular and militia troops, broke the Jacobite force of Charles Edward Stuart in under an hour of fighting. Around 1,500 to 2,000 Jacobites were killed on the field or in the subsequent rout; Government losses were a fraction of that. It was the last pitched battle fought on British soil and the last attempt to restore a Stuart to the throne.

The defeat triggered the long sequence of Highland reprisals that gives Cumberland his “Butcher” epithet, the 1746 Disarming Act, the Heritable Jurisdictions Act, and the proscription of the kilt and tartan, measures aimed at dismantling the clan system rather than just defeating an army. The subsequent Highland Clearances unfold across the following century against that ground.

The National Trust for Scotland’s visitor centre, built low into the moor’s edge in 2007 to avoid breaking the battlefield’s sight-lines, carries the standard chronological presentation: the campaign maps, the immersive 360-degree battlefield film placing the visitor between the two firing lines, named contemporary accounts from soldiers on both sides, and the audio-guided walk that traces the regimental positions and the clan graves out on the ground itself. Old Leanach Cottage, on the field, survives as the only structure standing on the day of the battle.

The visitor centre and audio-walk are paid-entry (NTS membership free); the moor itself is freely accessible at all times. Open year-round.