I have to be honest. I didn’t think I would go. I know, for a Scotia-phile on her first trip to Scotland that sounds like sacrilege. Madness. How could I not visit the site of the final battle that sent my Highlander ancestors from Scotland to North Carolina? How can an Outlander fan not go to Culloden? But the thing is, I’ve seen so many battlefields.

I grew up at the nexus of the Civil War. My childhood home was just a few miles from the Chancellorsville battlefield where my own three times great grandfather was killed. My first apartment was on Hanover Street in Fredericksburg just blocks away from Marye's Heights and the Sunken Road. My family's favorite vacation spot when I was young was within sight of Fort Fisher at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Even today, I can't go to town without driving past the Stonewall Jackson Shrine (not memorial, SHRINE).  After about the hundredth time visiting flat empty fields marked by plaques declaring which general did what and how many senseless deaths happened right where you're standing, a person can become inured to that kind of thing.