War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans
Alistair Moffat (Birlinn, £18.99)
ALISTAIR MOFFAT commends ‘the great value of getting out from behind a desk, shutting the lid of a laptop, putting on a pair of boots, taking a phone camera, a notebook and pen and going to the places where history happened even if they have radically changed in the interim’. His latest Scottish travel-history charts 12 journeys in the footsteps of the clans as they fight through a century of Covenanting and Jacobite unrest. Each chapter — The Snow March; Rain, Sleet and Speed; The Army of the Dead —is devoted to a different battle, juxtaposing a stirring account with the author’s own observations.
Dominating the narrative is the bloodthirsty spectacle of the Highland charge, the devastating battle tactic executed by forming into wedges and smashing through the enemy ranks with razor-sharp swords and dirks for close-quarter stabbing. Accompanied by pipes and
