I WALKED the battlefield this morning. It was cold, the wind biting, and I could see the snow on the hills. There were other people out as well, walking their dogs or stretching their legs.

When the centre was open to the public this walk was part of my regular routine. It gave me space to think amongst the bustle of a site that, pre-Covid, saw hundreds of thousands of visitors. It helped me step away from spreadsheets, emails and the pressures of running a busy learning team and refocus on what is important to me about this place. Why the work matters.

I joined the team at Culloden about 11 years ago, moving here from Canada to lead a team which delivers onsite programming for schoolchildren, battlefield tours and costumed interpretation on site. While I understood Culloden’s importance within Scottish history, I did not understand the deep-rooted emotions that surround it.

It very quickly became clear to me that there was something different about Culloden, something that went beyond the history of the site.

In 2018, alongside the operations manager for the site Raoul Curtis-Machin, we started work on the Culloden 300 project, prompted by a need to respond to an increasing amount of development proposals on battlefield areas not owned by the National Trust for Scotland.

The starting point was to understand what members of the public felt about the site. After all it is one thing for historians or a conservation charity to say a site is special; it is something else entirely for members of the public to say that it is special.

More than 3000 people responded to our survey, from Scotland and the wider world. Our communities kept articulating the importance of the history, the importance of the wider landscape and a need to protect. In other words, a sense of place.

For me, sense of place is when the historical event, the landscape itself and the emotions of a person come together and transcend the sum of their parts. Somewhere in the midst of that something larger is created – it is difficult to define and slippery to hold on to, but it is real and very powerful.

READ MORE: The lasting link between the Jacobites and an independent Scotland

Maybe it is because we can stand where Government and Jacobite soldiers stood, imagine their emotions and connect on a personal level. Maybe it is the aftermath of the battle, where communities and families were destroyed by a civil war. Maybe it is because of the romanticisation of the story that has occurred over the centuries.

In Professor Murray Pittock’s book Culloden, he talks about how the event is both the end and the beginning of something else, a pivotal moment which “resonates in the memory of the English-speaking world and the descendants of its Gaelic speaking allies and enemies”, a place which is “key to both the breaking and making of Britain, and with it its empire to which so many Jacobite prisoners and fugitives, and those who believe their ancestors to be Jacobite prisoners and fugitives, emigrated”.

Culloden is woven into the cultural fabric of Scotland. Fact, fiction and cultural memory can overlap in the popular imagination.

It isn’t just people who are Scottish who feel connected to the site. We have a huge community of interest from across the world, some of whom identify with Jacobite emigrants, others who feel connected through the histories.

People engage with Culloden in a range of ways – be it through music, television, books or histories it inspires them. It isn’t uncommon for a picture or a poem to arrive either by post or email – with a note saying how inspired a visitor was by the site and how they felt moved to mark it in some way. One of our respondents in the 300 survey said it best: “Teaching history is more engaging when it’s real, not just in a textbook. Having access to sites like Culloden allows us to inspire more people, young and old, to take an interest in our history.”

At Culloden before Covid, we saw around 4500 students over the year. We delivered school programmes for primary and secondary school students. We explored the stories of the people who were involved in the uprising and walked the ground where parts of the battle happened.

You might think that the battle would feel a long way away from a 12-year-old, but that wasn’t the case. For them it was relevant and real, as it should be for all of us. After all, it is the story of civil war, change, violence and the communities affected. It is what we see every day on television and these issues are very much part of our present.

Maybe it is because the big stories associated with Culloden are so part of our reality that the sense of place is so strong. I don’t know – but what is absolutely true is that this is a site that speaks to people 275 years after the event. It is meaningful, moving and universal. It is without question that the site, its stories and sense of place is powerful. We have a responsibility to the site, to the people whose lives were changed by this battle and to the communities that surround it. It is a responsibility I take very seriously.

Katey Boal is the engagement manager at Culloden Battlefield