Across Scotland in the footsteps of Bonnie Prince Charlie

The small boat bounced up the coast of South Uist, spray-battered, through a world of grey. Rock-scarred mountains towered to our left and, 30 miles away across the steely depths of the Minch, the cliffs of Skye fenced the horizon.

We were on a quest to find the cave at Corodale, where 276 years ago Bonnie Prince Charlie — the last serious Stuart claimant to the British throne — spent three weeks in hiding. He was the target of the largest manhunt Britain had ever seen, dodging nine British men-of-war scouring the Minch and hundreds of Redcoat government troops on land.

“It’s like the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” explained an ex-Special Boat Service friend. “As escape and evasion goes, it’s off the scale.” Like bin Laden, the prince was protected by the loyalty of mountain tribesmen: handed from clan to clan, sleeping in caves, climbing mountains, wading rivers, crawling past enemy troops in the dead of night, with torture, death and ruin awaiting his helpers. Like bin Laden, he had a vast price on his head: £30,000 — equivalent to £5mn today.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, aka the Young Pretender, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in July 1745 at Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides, hoping to win back the crown his grandfather James II of England and VII of Scotland had lost in 1688, in a revolution engendered by his Catholicism. The Stuarts, with their Jacobite supporters, had already tried several times to win it back but by the 1740s, backed by Louis XV, Catholic king of France, they saw another chance.

Despite coming with only seven men and little money, the 24-year-old prince raised an army of Highlanders through sheer charisma. They took Scotland and marched as far south as Derby before — to Charles’s horror — his Highland chieftains, far from their supply lines and worried by the failure of support from the English, insisted on turning back. They also had different strategic aims to the prince’s. While many chiefs wanted an independent Scotland, a return to the power they had wielded before the Act of Union in 1707, the Stuarts wanted the British crown.

Over the next few months, to the prince’s despair, his army retreated further into their mountains, despite winning several battles along the way, until their first — but decisive — defeat at Culloden on April 16 1746, the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil.

We were following the route of the prince’s escape after Culloden: 530 miles, over five months, much of it on foot. He travelled across some of the most beautiful scenery in the world: sea lochs, mountains and forests that are home to stags and golden eagles, landscapes rich with stories of monsters or lost gold, and the white sands of the Outer Hebrides.

We were driving — because I’m 55 with a dodgy ankle, and not a battle-hardened 24-year-old in fear of his life. For masochists there is Malcolm Seddon’s hill walker’s guide, The Escape of Bonnie Prince Charlie (2016), with maps, a day-by-day timetable and historical accounts.

Culloden battlefield, on Drummossie Moor just outside Inverness, is stalked by lost dreams. When we visited, a brisk summer wind fluttered the flags showing the position of the rival front lines; families wandered the stone cairns marking each clan’s mass graves, an occasional white rose, a Jacobite symbol, wilting in the sun. Charles had amassed 5,000 troops, but the British army, led by the Duke of Cumberland, son of King George II, had superior numbers, artillery and tactics. The battle lasted less than an hour, and at the end between 1,000 and 1,500 Jacobites were dead; the government had lost only 50 men.

The distraught prince was extracted quickly by his core group of officers: he needed to live to fight another day. Among his coterie was Ned Burke, an Edinburgh sedan chair carrier, who would prove vital as, alone among these 18th-century aristocrats, he knew how to cook.

We followed Bonnie Prince Charlie down the forested strath of the River Nairn to Fort Augustus at the foot of Loch Ness, a fortress-turned-monastery (now transformed into holiday apartments, presumably catering for Nessie-obsessives). Here the prince had hoped the clans would regroup to carry on the campaign, but instead the chiefs told him their men would fight no more — he should go back to France for money, weapons and troops. But to do that he needed to reach the coast and a ship.

The prince led us along the lochs and canals of the Great Glen until we reached Invergarry Castle, on the wooded slopes of Loch Oich, where the prince rested, and which was later burnt by Cumberland and his Redcoats. It’s still a burnt-out ruin today.

In heavy rain, we continued driving up to Loch Arkaig, its approach so overshadowed the locals call it the “Dark Mile”. As well as its own monster lurking in the depths, Loch Arkaig holds the secret of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s gold, the 30,000 Louis d’Or landed by the French too late, 10 days after the defeat at Culloden. Most of this treasure has yet to be found. At the head of the loch, the road peters out into mountain and bog. Here the prince and his officers abandoned their horses and walked for two days and nights through the mountains, past Loch Morar. At 1,017ft, Morar is the UK’s deepest lake and, unsurprisingly, home to another legendary monster.

We did a U-turn and drove to Loch nan Uamh, a sea loch 15 miles south of Skye, a limpid fretwork of tree-frilled islands, white beaches ringed by green-furred granite peaks. Eighteenth-century communications being poor, the prince had to rely on pre-made plans; Loch nan Uamh, where he first landed on mainland Scotland, seems to have been the rendezvous point.

The loch lay empty; we swam in the glassy waters and ate our baps. When the prince arrived he found no French ships. He waited six days as survivors limped in, with reports of the Duke of Cumberland’s vengeance — men and women murdered and raped, cattle and sheep stolen, houses burnt, earning the duke his nickname “The Butcher”. Cumberland’s reprisals were to ensure that the Stuarts and Highlanders never threatened his father’s throne again. When Charles heard the Redcoats were closing in, he decided to return to the Hebrides and hire a ship.

We crossed to Uist in a CalMac ferry from Mallaig, sailing into the setting sun, past the islands of Muck, Eigg and Rum. It took us three hours. The prince crossed at night, in a howling storm in a small wooden boat, and nearly drowned.

Uist feels like the back of the world, an ageless landscape of peat bog and sea, fringed by trackless mountains, with nothing between its white sand beaches and America. Here the prince was trapped for weeks, gradually turned into a shaggy, lice-ridden mountain man, sleeping in caves or out on the hillside; he would not ride a horse for five months. But as his beard and his troubles grew, so did his reputation. He rarely showed a crack in his morale, so the stories go, keeping up the spirits of all around him, making jokes, dancing jigs and winning drinking competitions, never standing on ceremony.

We had good weather on Uist — grey-blue skies, little rain — unlike Charles, who suffered one of the stormiest summers in years. We were travelling with a friend, Andrew Macdonald of Boisdale, a member of the Macdonald clan and a direct descendant of Charles’s host. The sun shone as Macdonald’s RIB crested the waves to where his ancestor had hidden the prince.

The cave was marked on our map, but it was hard to match the chart with the crags. Then we saw a break in the rocks, a secret cove, a tiny, pebbled beach backed by a cliff. Scrambling up a hidden path, we found Corodale’s green glen, walls soaring on either side. Unlike us, Charles had to walk here, as gunships were patrolling the Minch — 19 hours over hill and bog — but he was safe for a while: for Cumberland’s Redcoats this terrain would have been as alien as to the prince.

My friend clambered ahead to find the cave. As he cried “I’ve got it!” we heard an almost human howl: on the corrie’s far wall, a golden eagle was sinking its talons into a baby deer. The calf’s mother screamed, warning her child. The eagle dropped the calf, which scrambled up the mountainside followed by its mother, as the eagle swooped fruitlessly above.

The cave was 150ft above the sea, 10ft deep and 5ft high, sheltered but with a vast view of any ships, British or French. Lookouts on the encircling hills could have spotted any troops who’d managed the walk. Corodale is said to have been one of the few places where, in his months on the run, the prince was able to relax: shooting game, singing songs and, of course, drinking. But after three weeks, the Redcoats were combing Uist and he had to move on — finally being smuggled off the island in drag.

We sailed for two hours towards Skye, leaving the sun setting over Uist behind, the Minch mirror-calm. For the prince, the journey was different, according to the words of “The Skye Boat Song”: “loud the wind howls, loud the waves roar, thunderclaps rend the air”. On Skye, we stayed at the Skeabost Hotel, a white Victorian hunting lodge overlooking the sea loch. Poor Prince Charlie had to sleep in more caves.

Our few days on Skye were filled with picnics, castle visits and swimming in drizzle. Charles spent his walking the entire length of the Cuillin mountains at night in driving rain.

Back on the mainland, Charles again fled into the hills, spending his last few weeks on British soil holed up in a mountain shelter called Cluny’s Cage, overlooking Loch Ericht. The visitors’ centre at Achnacarry by Loch Arkaig, seat of Clan Cameron, has a life-size model of the shaggy prince, unshaven, clad in plaid and a long shirt, eyeing a dead rabbit with a thousand-yard stare.

At 1am on September 14, a runner stumbled into Cluny’s Cage to say that two French ships were waiting. The prince set off immediately, making it to Loch nan Uamh in five days. He left on September 20 1746, sure he would return with the support that Louis XV had promised. But Louis refused even to meet him face to face. Charles sank into alcoholism, paranoia, despair and disgrace — nowadays he’d be diagnosed with PTSD. In the Highlands and Islands, however, the bonnie prince is still loved: despite his wake of destruction, nobody betrayed him for the £30,000. His legend, part of the Highlands’ enchantment, was born from his time on the run.

Ned Burke, the sedan chair carrier, returned to Edinburgh a few years later, and spent the rest of his life regaling passengers with tales of his part in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape. We hope to return to Loch nan Uamh next year. But the prince never went back to Scotland again.

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