A very strange battle at Culloden

I WAS at a loss to understand Andrew Learmonth’s exclusive on a Canadian “Jacobite” couple (It’s the Highland Clearances all over again ... Jacobites turfed off Culloden battlefield, News, October 23).

“Twice a month for the last decade,” wrote Mr Learmonth, “patriotic pensioners Ed and Sandy Hastings – from Canada but proud and adopted Scots – have taken to the Inverness battlefield in their full Jacobite costumes.” Why? For no pecuniary interest, and apparently with no accreditation from the National Trust of Scotland (NTS), which owns the landmark, the Hastings have been regaling tourists with tales of the Bonnie Prince, etc. Their qualifications for doing so? Apparently Ed’s “long-lost father was Scottish”. The article suggests a gross injustice because the NTS, within a context of “clamping down on visitors taking weapons to the battlefield,” clamped down on the couple who had taken “home-made weapons” to the battlefield, and told them to leave.

Whatever a couple does in their own home is their business. But when they do it on an official site of historic national interest, that makes it the business of the NTS.

I suppose, long-lost father or not, I could level things up by going to a sacred Inuit site in Canada and educating everyone, including the Inuits, upon the indigenous culture there, but I wouldn’t presume to do so.

There are some things you cannot learn from the internet, nor buy from a gift shop. If I were visiting a Native American reservation and my tour guide’s name was Calum McDuff, I’d demand my money back.

Surely the question Mr Learmonth should have posed was not only why were Ed and Sandy Hastings cleared from Culloden, but why had they been allowed to settle there “twice a month for the last decade”?