Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The '95 games were a big occasion because they were marking the 250th anniversary
of the raising of the standard at Glenfinnan at the beginning of the 1745 rebellion (the one
that started in Glenfinnan, went by way of Derby and was finished on a bleak bit of moor-
land outside Inverness called Culloden). Usually the Glenfinnan Games attract under a
thousand entrants and spectators - which is still not bad for a wee village - but in '95
there were getting on for ten thousand people swarming over the place: loads of locals,
myriads of generally slightly bemused tourists, dozens of history junkies and far-flung
nationalists who'd jetted in from all over the world for the event, bunches of TV, radio
and press people - thanks to the sun, the setting and the crowds, the photographs were
front-page splashes in various Scottish newspapers the following day - and an awful lot
of those very serious-looking guys who dress up in authentically bulky and brownly dour
highland dress, carry formidable-looking claymores, swords and nail-studded shields and
who, as a rule, sport Extreme Beards. Beards of such rampant abundance they look en-
tirely capable of concealing within their tangled topography an entire redcoat-murdering
ambush party of tooled-up Highlanders.
On games day '95 these guys mostly had very red faces, partly due to sunburn (and
possibly partly due to the presence of so many unashamedly English tourists - I don't
know) and partly due to the fact that those heavy, dark, historically authentic plaids -
which I'm sure really are what my ancestors used to wear, but which I confess always re-
mind me of giant brown nappies - are fine for keeping you warm in the teeth of a swirling
Highland downpour of severe lashingness, but are not really optimum apparel for days
when the sunlight is beating down like a golden sledgehammer and the tarmac is melting
on the roads. They were, accordingly, some of our best customers at the ice-cream tent,
which was, by a coincidence, right next to the Drambuie marquee.
Drambuie's link with the event was more than just gratuitous; after the Jacobite
defeat at Culloden, Prince Charlie escaped back to Paris via Skye with the help of Flora
MacDonald. He died in Rome, 40 years later, after living in Paris and Florence, mostly,
and after having made two or three secret visits to London in the 1750s. There were mis-
tresses and wives and he never entirely gave up hoping he might really become Charles
the Third of Great Britain; died with his boots off. Not such a bad life, considering. Cer-
tainly more agreeable than being torn to bits by grapeshot and musket-fire during the
battle itself, or being butchered afterwards while lying wounded, or trying to run away.
Anyway, while on Skye he stayed with the MacKinnon family and drank Drambuie,
which, as Walter Schobert points out in his exhaustive
The Whisk(e)y Treasury
, very
likely represents the way whisky used to be drunk back then, at least amongst the toffs;
that is as a fine malt mixed with honey and herbs. There seems to be some dispute over
whether Prince Charlie already had the recipe and gave it to the MacKinnons as a thank
you, or they already had the recipe and just - eventually - made canny use of the romant-
