Seeing the above in the Scotsman, I was reminded that nearly four years ago, I wrote this and got a ‘mixed’ response. How about we apply my thinking then about Fort George, to all the National Trust’s castles, palaces, prisons, dungeons, stately homes?
Oh, yeh, and, sack Neil Oliver!
Images: caernarfon.com, undiscoveredscotland.co.uk, fortapachearizona.org
Here’s what the Aberdeen-based Press & Journal thinks:
‘Fort George closure would cost Highland economy millions of pounds. Plans to close the historic Fort George barracks could cost the Highland economy £14million a year and lead to the loss of more than 100 jobs, it has emerged.’
Further down, the PJ reports:
‘Built after the Battle of Culloden, the garrison has been the home of the famous 500-strong Black Watch battalion for almost a decade, and also houses the regimental museum for The Highlanders.’
The campaign to save the fort has full cross-party support including that of newly-appointed Depute-Leader of the SNP, Angus Robertson. Is he biased? Like some of my Robertson ancestors, some of his, probably got jobs with the Black Watch helping to keep the other tribes down, on behalf of the German, House of Hanover, UK monarchy at the time…..and still today? And, his mother is German and he speaks German fluently. He needs to declare any interests on this one.
I’m going out on a limb here, I know, but why don’t we think differently about this and similar historical sites? You could see them as places best forgotten rather than preserved. I began to think this way during a visit to North Wales with it’s impossible-to-ignore string of massive Norman castles. They are big, ugly and physically dominating things just at face value but if you think of what they were for, it’s much worse. These 12th Century monstrosities were built to dominate the Welsh, to remind them of their inferior status and were places of torture and imprisonment. It’s important to remember too that they were part of a wider domination of the Anglo-Saxons/English by a brutal French-speaking warrior elite just at the beginning of their imperial expansion.
More than four hundred years later, that imperial project had just finished-off the last element of resistance in mainland Britain, the tribes of the Scottish Highlands. After victory by an imperial army at Culloden in 1746, the clans were ‘pacified’. This brutal process of punishment, humiliation and killing is today well-known. As with the Welsh, centuries before, Celtic cultural expression was banned and a chain of great forts was built to maintain control of the ‘tribes’. They are still with us today as Fort William, Fort Augustus and Fort George. Going further in the humiliation for the local population than was the case in Wales, they take the names of British aristocrats and have become the place-names of the settlements they stand in.
Less than two centuries later, a more fully genocidal project but with its roots still in Anglo-Norman imperialism was to put down many more forts across the lands of the aboriginal tribes of North America. Fort Apache is the best known but there are many more.
Is Fort George just our Fort Apache? Would the descendants of the Apache like to pay taxes for its preservation, I wonder?
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
What’s that BBC thing about the polis doing there? No idea.
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A letter in the National the other day from the – oh, I don’t know who he was – president? chairman? CEO? of the organisation – asked what would replace it if we did away with the National Trust for Scotland.
I’m still a member of the NTS for the moment, although I really don’t know why. It was useful when I was working for a council in international education and wanted to take visitors from other parts of the world to see interesting places outside Glasgow (everything in Glasgow is free and we haunted their historic buildings). I knew my employers wouldn’t fork out for a corporate NTS membership and could sometimes blag my way in to NTS properties with my card, a foreign visitor and a sob story. I’ve also been a volunteer at one of their establishments but I’ll try not to base my views on what happened there…
I should have left when I read about the Hill House (Helensburgh) ‘box’. I’ve yet to see a price for that. Never mind a development plan or a risk assessment
The NTS is quite simply too big and tries to do far too much. It owns islands and estates and I doubt if it has ever refused to take on a property it was offered, no matter how bad a condition it was in. But that’s not the biggest problem. When an organisation takes on a historic property, it has to have the specialist staff to maintain it. A moth infestation in a stately home is costly. And specialist staff don’t come cheap.
I’m not talking here about the staff who work ‘on the ground’ with visitors, who are paid in buttons. Or the volunteers who do their best but often lack direction from ‘managers’.
It can all seem a bit amateur. Twee even. I’m probably prejudiced but the Glasgow City Council museum staff and volunteers strike me as being much more on the ball.
NTS needs a big bucket of reality flung over it and the forthcoming economic crisis will provide that.
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A people who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.
An argument for keeping the places of torture and imprisonment of our ancestors.
Is Fort Grorge big enough to lock up the current crop of anti imperial Scottish Radicals.
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We could have plaque next to the ruins?
Ain’t no prison big enough! We are legion!
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I always wonder about Scotland’s ruins.
We have castles galore, many of them falling down.
Yet when someone proposed to spend £1 or 5 million to restore Castle Tioram, he was turned down. Why?
It seems for some, a big pile of rocks is more important than a castle restored to its former condition.
Luck for auld Queen Betty (Boop) that she didn’t have to apply to some Hon Farquhar or Lady Fiona to get Winsor castle rebuilt.
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How about street name plaques and start in Edinburgh
As I pass or drive along them I so wish
I could procure a ladder then climb and spit upon the name they carry
For a start Cumberland St & Cromwell St
No self respecting Nation could every possibly allow such obscene murderous
Indivuals have their name honoured
Do you honestly believe Germany would name streets after
Hitler Himmler etc
Why should we partake in the glory of our oppressors
Start with the school curriculum in Scottish schools by imparting the truth
Contained in our History
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