Abstract

Managing Heritage: The National Trust for Scotland and Culloden

Heritage in its present form is an oddly modern phenomenon, which seeks to reconcile (to use the terminology employed by the National Trust for Scotland) the demands of ‘conservation’, ‘commerce’ and ‘community’. These principles have now been applied to the site of the cataclysmic battle of Culloden (16 April 1746), which put an end to any realistic hope of a Stuart restoration in Britain, and which carries powerful associations among Scots at the present day. A brief discussion of the course of the battle is followed by the story of the site over the next two and a half centuries, and of the thinking and striving which led to the opening of the restored battlefield and the new Visitor Centre on 16 April 2009’