The Jacobite cause -- the movement to restore the Catholic Stuart monarchy -- had simmered for decades before Prince Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland in 1745. "Bonnie Prince Charlie" rallied the Highland clans and marched south with a French-backed force, reaching as far as Derby in England before the lack of English support, the massing of government armies, and a Royal Navy blockade of French reinforcements forced a long retreat northward. By April 1746, the Prince had never lost a battle, but his exhausted, starving force of 5,000 to 6,000 men found itself back in the Highlands with nowhere left to run. The government army, slightly larger and vastly better supplied, was closing in.

The encounter began at one o'clock on a cold, rain-swept afternoon. A short artillery exchange preceded the Jacobite charge across the boggy moor -- terrain that favoured the government's disciplined volleys over the traditional Highland rush. Less than an hour later, the Jacobites were slain, captured, or in flight. The government forces under the Duke of Cumberland suffered roughly 50 killed and around 259 wounded. The Jacobite dead numbered between 1,500 and 2,000. What followed the battle was worse than the battle itself. Cumberland's troops hunted fleeing Jacobites for miles, killing the wounded where they lay. The brutality earned him the nickname "Butcher Cumberland" among the Scots, a name that has not softened with time.

Culloden did not merely defeat an army. The government reprisals that followed targeted the entire Highland way of life. The wearing of tartan was banned. The carrying of weapons was forbidden. The clan chiefs lost their hereditary jurisdictions. The Gaelic language, already under pressure, was actively suppressed. Prince Charles escaped and spent six months as a fugitive across the Highlands before slipping back to France, where he lived out his remaining years in exile and decline. The romantic image of a lost prince fleeing through the heather has proved durable, but the reality for those left behind was devastation on an industrial scale.

The battlefield, managed by the National Trust for Scotland, is eerily quiet. Clan grave markers dot the moor -- simple stones bearing names like Fraser, Mackintosh, Stewart, Cameron -- each marking the rough location where the dead of that clan fell and were buried. The "Well of the Dead" marks the spot where a wounded Jacobite chief is said to have crawled for a last drink of water. Nearby, the Clava Cairns offer a different kind of historical gravity: Bronze Age burial chambers that were ancient before the Stuarts existed. The 29-span Culloden Viaduct, opened in 1898, carries the Perth-Inverness railway across the valley of the River Nairn, a reminder that time moves on even where memory does not.