OFTEN, the veil that separates past from present in the Highlands is barely visible. Old quarrels from distant ages, still burnished, shine brightly through its gossamer thinness. A mere 300 or so intervening years, therefore, are as nothing to the 1,000 participants who attend an occasion such as the annual memorial service for the Battle of Culloden. It is the Highlands’ own Remembrance Day, an event that no other battlefield in Britain can host.
This April, at the cairn on Drumossie Moor, the clans mustered again to lay their wreaths in memory of their dead and of a way of life that perished with them on April 16, 1746. For the last pitched battle on British soil, between Prince Charles Edward Stuart and William, Duke of Cumberland, marked not only the demise of the Jacobite movement, but the end of the old clan system,
