On 16 April 1746, Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite army was broken on Drumossie Moor outside Inverness by the troops of Prince William, Duke of Cumberland. Within an hour the rising was over, and within days the Hanoverian government had placed a bounty of £30,000 on the prince's head, a sum that would have made any ordinary tenant a laird for life. Yet for five months Charles moved through the Highlands and Islands without being betrayed. He was passed hand to hand by farmers, boatmen, Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, and even men who had fought against him. The caves were way-stations on that long flight, and the silence around them was a kind of collective Highland answer to London.

The cave on Meilchan sits above Loch nan Uamh in Inverness-shire, a small green hillock with a hollow at its base. The loch's Gaelic name means "loch of the caves," and it was here that Charles first landed on the Scottish mainland in July 1745 to launch his rising. Fourteen months later he came back to the same shore to wait for a French ship. The symmetry is what gives the local cave its claim. He sailed for France on 20 September 1746 from a beach a short walk away, never to return to Scotland. The hillock above his embarkation point became, in memory, the last Scottish ground he stood on before exile.

Further inland, another cave high above Glenmoriston is associated with one of the more remarkable episodes of the flight. In the summer of 1746 the prince was sheltered for several days by a band who called themselves the Seven Men of Glenmoriston, broken Jacobite soldiers living rough in the hills after the defeat. They were poor, the bounty was enormous, and they had every practical reason to give him up. None of them did. When the prince's party finally moved on, the Seven Men were said to have sworn oaths of secrecy that they kept for the rest of their lives. The cave they used is still pointed out on the hill above Loch Lon a'Ghairt, reached now by a path through birch woods that thicken in summer into a green tunnel.

Charles slept rough in heather, in shielings, in fishermen's bothies, and yes, in caves. He moved by night. He travelled in disguise as a maidservant called Betty Burke when Flora MacDonald rowed him from Benbecula to Skye. By the time he left Scotland, an entire generation of Highlanders had a story to tell about the prince, and a place where he had supposedly slept. Some of those stories were true. Some were borrowed from neighbours and made local. After the rising the Highlands were systematically punished by Cumberland's army, the wearing of tartan was outlawed, and a way of life began to be dismantled. Holding on to a cave the prince had used was a quiet kind of resistance, and a quiet kind of grief.

Visit any of the contenders today and you will find the same essential thing: a slot in the rock above wet ground, sometimes a few feet deep, sometimes more, with a view that gives the occupant a long time to see anyone coming. None of them is comfortable. None of them is heated. In late September, when Charles finally embarked for France, the nights this far north are already cold and very long. Whichever cave was the real one, the prince spent some of his hours in it looking down at a loch he might never cross, listening for the sound of redcoats on the path below.