Day 8 "Cullen Bay"

I'm not sure what I expected to find at Culloden, just outside Inverness. It's the battlefield where the English finally defeated "Bonnie Prince Charlie" in the 1740's. Today it's a few paddocks filled with scrub with a few flags showing various positions during the battle.
At this stage of my journey and reading I have no illusions that young Charles was glorious, bonnie or anything more than another European aristocrat trying to beat English aristocrats for control of Britain. "My" Scots from the Isles were not affected by the outcome - they were destined to be poor crofters no matter which group of aristocrats were to be successful.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I leave Culloden, Inverness, the Highlands and the Islands behind and head into the flat Moray coast area of Banffshire. Yet another family of ancestors must have picked the right side at Culloden and were rewarded with tenancies around Cullen and Fordyce.

"Cullen Bay" is a catchy tune I used to play in pipe bands and is probably the spark that ignited the interest in Genealogy when I discovered a Great Great Grandfather was born at Cullen. This was to be a Family History visit.

It's very obvious that this is an organised area - the estates of the Earls of Seafield. Cullen itself is closed at 2pm on the Wednesday I arrive. It's has an old Seatown on the foreshore and a "new" town centre up the hill.

I find the ruins of the church where ancestors married in 1749 at Deskford, graves of others at ruins in Fordyce and retire, perplexed, for the day.

By now I have a highlander's aversion to "the English" and the aristocracy yet, remembering the glee at Dunvegan, am helpless to feel anything but pride and satisfaction in this, very different, part of Scotland where another part of me originated.