Bannockburn... home and away!
Thousands flock to Australian town with same name
THEY are two communities situated 11,000 miles apart, both l i nked to Robert the Bruce’s greatest victory.
But when the small Australian town of Bannockburn held an event to mark the 700th anniversary of the battle, it was a massive hit, drawing more than 10,000 people.
Across the ocean, though, this weekend’s Scottish equivalent, Bannockburn Live, which is taking place across two days, has so far sold 11,000 tickets of the 15,000 available.
Unlike the Scottish original with its actual Bannock Burn, the rural Australian township features Victorian colonial architecture and landmarks including vineyards and gum trees.
Lying 58 miles south-west of Melbourne, it has a population of only 4,000.
The highlight of its event last weekend saw costumed re- enactors play out the battle in which Bruce defeated England’s Edward II on June 23-24, 1314 – on the town’s golf course.
Other attractions included jousting, pipe bands, Highland dancing, a medieval clan village, Scottish folk bands, archery and a screening of Braveheart.
Earlier this month, organisers of this weekend’s Bannockburn celebrations on the site in Stirlingshire slashed ticket prices in a bid to boost sales.
At that point, around half of the tickets f or Bannockburn Live – launched almost a year ago – were still on the shelf, despite the national tourism agency VisitScotland taking over the running of the event in January.
With 8,000 tickets sold, the organising team discounted family tickets by £10 to enhance sales for the festival, which f eature singer- songwriters Dougie MacLean and Julie Fowlis, King Creosote and Rachel Sermanni.
A proposed third day was axed and capacity cut from 45,000 to 20,000, then revised down again in April to 15,000.
VisitScotland yesterday insisted sales were ‘on target’. A spokesman said: ‘We’re up around the 11,000 mark. Most sales are from UK, but over a tenth are from the US.’ He added: ‘We are on track to deliver an absolutely incredible , memorable event and we urge people to get their tickets now to avoid disappointment.’
Jen Darby, 39, from Stirling, who moved to Melbourne more than a decade ago, said she took her children Travis, six, and four-year- old Becca to the Australian event to give them a taste of their Scottish heritage.
She explained: ‘ Even after being in Australia for 11 years, with all the celebrations for 700 years since Bannockburn going on in Scotland I was feeling a bit homesick. I was delighted to find out that another Bannockburn, just 100km from me, was having a celebration.’
She added: ‘ The kids loved it and I was able to get a sliced sausage and tattie scone roll with brown sauce – it’s the little things you miss.’
At the historic battle, Edward II brought an army of up to 20,000 men to Stirling to crush Robert the Bruce and relieve the besieged English garrison at Stirling Castle. But the outnumbered Scots overcame the odds to record their greatest ever vi ctory on t he battlefield.
TODAY is a day for national celebration. No, not because it is the feast day of St John the Baptist. I accept that Scotl and i s broadly secular nowadays.
The reason for the celebration is my birth. Yes, it’s my birthday. So, go on, crack open a bottle of champagne, kick back and enjoy yourselves.
Steady on, you’re thinking, I might like your writing but isn’t celebrating a random birthday of yours going too far? Well, it is indeed ludicrous but it makes just as much sense as a national celebration to mark the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.
I do not object to marking the date simply because it is taxpayer’s money being spent on a party political broadcast. Though it clearly is.
Just l ook at the tweets from Nationalist MPs. Party MSP Richard Lyle is typical.
He tweeted: ‘700 years today since the start of the Battle of Bannockburn. Make 2014 the year we finally win our Independence for good # Vote YES.’
Now, even the dogs in the street know that September 2014 wasn’t chosen as the referendum date just so that we could have a long and forensic debate on the pros and cons of independence.
The year was picked because of a desire to generate a steadily growing wave of emotional support for separation. Simply put, the equation was Bannockburn + Commonwealth Games = Freedom.
That was so blatant, so insultingly obvious, that one knew Scottish voters would see straight through it. After all, our heads don’t button up the back. The problem is with what is actually being celebrated – the subjugation of ordinary Scots to the rule of one particular invader rather than another.
Overblown
The fetishisation of Bannockburn and Robert the Bruce glosses over a few difficult facts. First, his name was really ‘de Brus’. He wasn’t a Scot f r om an ancient Scottish family who fought to liberate his homeland from the tyrannous English.
In fact he, and his father, had welcomed Edward I’s invasion in 1296 when he sought to depose John Balliol – in one family’s fall, they thought, another might rise. Not for Bruce the overblown rhetoric of the Declaration of Arbroath: ‘For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English.’
Robert the Bruce had himself appealed to that very lordship a number of times.
Bruce was just one Anglo-Norman nobleman with a claim on a crown defeating another Anglo-Norman nobleman who had a crown. At stake was the prize of the right to oppress ordinary Scots or, as they were known then, serfs (in modern terms – slaves.)
To put all of the events of the ‘Wars of Independence’ into perspective, the population of Scotland during the lifetime of Robert the Bruce was about a million. The number of noblemen? About 100.
So the signatories of the Declaration of Arbroath didn’t mean they’d fight for freedom to the last one hundred, they really meant freedom was for ‘a hundred of us’.
There is much that is vomitinducing about nationalism but nothing more so than its wilful distortion of history. Every fact is tortured until it fits a narrative of ‘liberation’. It is impossible to project back our modern nation – and sense of nationhood – onto the past in any historically valid way.
The Battle of Bannockburn was not the primal act of founding a separate nation, it was an event in the history of a pre-modern country. It is far less important than, say, the battle of Nechtansmere, where the Picts beat the Northumbrians, paving the way for the first unified Scottish kingdom.
And it is highly inappropriate to celebrate with pomp and ceremony what would have been a brutal and bloody battle which will have ended not with neat war graves, but with bodies used as bonemeal for fertilising fields.
It is only the distance of history that allows the heartlessness of turning death into entertainment.
So we are breathlessly told by the promoters of Bannockburn Live that: ‘Each day there are three opportunities to watch the re- enactment ensuring plenty of time for all to enjoy the action… there will be more than 300 living historians working and preparing for battle throughout the day.’
Set aside one’s scepticism about the ‘working historians’ – presumably they mean out of work actors pretending to be footsoldiers – but just imagine the public disgust if there were to be a similar attempt to ‘re- enact’ the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Just because we are 700 years, rather than a century, away f r om t he sl aughter doesn’t make i t any more entertaining.
It is a tribute to the canny common sense of ordinary Scots that they have not bought into the sentimentality of the celebration of Bannockburn. Tickets for the re- enactment didn’t sell out.
For modern Scotland, and most Scots, a national story that roots itself in defining our country against England makes no sense. It is the very success and ease of our relationship within the UK that makes it impossible to generate a historical narrative of grievance that is less than 700 years old.
Co-operation
The great events of the last hundred years have been as Scottish as they are English. The defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie was as j oyously celebrated in Edinburgh and Glasgow as it was in London.
There are points in Scottish history which should be celebrated for the way in which they put us on the path to modernity. The glory of the Enlightenment and the great figures such as Adam Smith or David Hume who lived, wrote and taught in Scotland.
Or when James Watt invented the steam engine, creating a power source that still generates electricity and transforming modern manufacturing.
But no nationalist can cheer for them because they are British stories. The two temples of the Enlightenment were the High Street in Edinburgh and the British Museum.
As f or Watt, he actually i mproved an Englishman’s invention, and then manufactured it in Birmingham.
Modern Scottish stories are all like this – about cooperation and collaboration not conflict.
Some will say that this is an over-reaction to a colourful and entertaining couple of days. I disagree profoundly.
The way you talk about your past is the way you shape your choices for the future.
Robert the Bruce was not a liberator in any modern sense, not the medieval equivalent of Mandela.
The history of Scotland is one of light and shade with many bad things done to Scots by Scots, and only corrected by Britons.
Take slavery. For most something that disappeared in the middle ages when serfdom vanished, but re-introduced in Scotland in 1606 for miners (‘colliers’) and their families and only abolished in 1799.
An honest, clear- sighted account of our own story in all its difficulty and complexity is essential.
The 700th anniversary of Bannockburn could do us all a good turn if we could agree 700 and out.
A national identity founded on myths of difference and grievance i s damaging. We should let go the myths of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace – we should ban ‘Braveheart’.
It’s time to tell the truth about our past and so enable ourselves to build the brighter, richer, fairer future that we all want.