We're nearing the end of our tour of Scotland. Yesterday we left the Western Isles and crossed by ferry back to the mainland. It's an almost three-hour crossing, by a reasonably speedy ferry, of a troubled body of water called the Minch. I couldn't help but reflect on what a harrowing journey it must have been, in a small boat, for the Young Pretender, as Bonnie Prince Charlie was called, on his retreat after the disastrous defeat of his Highland army here at Culloden.

Scotland has been a battleground since before recorded history; for the first recorded history tells of battles in the first century between the Romans and the natives, whom they named Picts because of their body paint, and later immigrants, the Scoti, whom they named Caledonians. Looking at the long, grim history of desperate battles ever since, it would be easy to consider the Scottish soil the world's most frequently fertilized by blood.

Scots have been the victims of, in turn, the Romans, the Norse, and the English. ("Not the British!" cautions our guide. "We're all British here in the United Kingdom. They are the English.") Most of their battles have been over matters of domination and freedom, and the pretext has often been religion. On top of that, the clans have fought each other from time to time. In such a rugged, sparsely settled land, tribal groups became suspicious of each other, and were liable to fight to the death over stolen livestock – a social setting reminiscent of early Iceland or the Hatfields and McCoys. We stood one day on the south shore of Loch Lomond. This was the land of the Colquhouns. The brooding hills across the loch were the home of the MacFarlanes, renowned as cattle thieves. The moon was therefore referred to as "MacFarlanes lantern," and the bad blood lasted for centuries.

There are ruined castles everywhere, and even earlier brochs, beehive-shaped stone domes for the defense of humbler families. All of them attest to the lawlessness of medieval Scotland, as well as the clan chieftains' desire to keep the English from taking over. None of them were impregnable, and mainly attracted aggression and caused suffering for the poor folks living around them. After 400 years of attacks upon Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness, its last owners blew up the gate house and abandoned it, leaving its stones for the locals to use in their own projects.

English kings historically had had a difficult time with the notion of Scottish independence, championed so famously by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Henry VIII more or less rekindled the bonfire in the 1530s. The first English king to accede to power without violence, he stirred the pot of destiny by renouncing Catholicism when the pope refused to grant an annulment of his first marriage, which had produced a daughter. He made himself the head of the Church of England. Anglicanism's association with the monarch is no doubt the source of its image as the faith of the hoity-toity. At any rate, the religious wars that followed during the next two centuries were bloody and fierce, and Scotland bore its share of the punishment.

Every city, town, and village here seems to have its great memorial cross or cenotaph dedicated to those who have died in 200 years of literally hundreds of wars and battles. Many are in memory of "The Great War," from 1914 to 1918. But others, like these here at Culloden, are the mass graves of, for example,"Mixed Clans" – highlanders so butchered in the battle that their tartans were obscured by blood. Prince Charlie got away (disguised as a lady's maid); the clansmen died; their families were subsequently executed by the English commander for their support of the Catholic pretender; the kilt, Catholicism, and the bagpipes were outlawed. Naturally, none of these proscriptions was permanent, leading to the question, what in the world was it all for?

On the walls of the Glasgow Cathedral are a great number of plaques dedicated to the Scots who died defending the fringes of the Empire during the 1800s. They died in Crimea, Afghanistan, Sudan, "the memorable battle" of Vittoria, Peking, all over India, Egypt, South Africa, Maiwan, the "war to end all wars," the Second World War, and Northern Ireland. I didn't see any dedicated to the Highlanders of the Black Watch who were slaughtered in the assault on Fort Ticonderoga in 1759. The support of churches seems to be languishing currently in Scotland, which may be why there aren't any recent plaques to the dead of modern Afghanistan or Iraq. One of the plaques, to a dead colonel, ended, "Death is swallowed up in victory." Clearly, the casualties of attempts to preserve empires – impermanent things at best – aren't just soldiers and their families. Common sense and truth die, too. We should have learned that by now.