Friday May sixth 2011

 
This morning we woke up in Dunkeld, had breakfast and went for a walk. Tiana and I walked through town in search of a cathedral and then decided to go find the Birnam path. The trail was full of green and brown and was parallel to a river. The path was sort of mystical because it was literally misting and there was fog on top of the mountains. The reason for the path was to find the "Birnam Wood" from Macbeth. The quote from the play is "Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill Shall come agains him." this was said in the witches' prophecy, act 4 scene 1 of Macbeth. (fun fact, I played witch #1 in fifth grade :). So that was pretty cool, seeing this giant tree. It had support beams holding a couple of branches up. It was incredible. After that we left on a train for Inverness. Then we ate lunch in a mall. I can't wait to go back to the mall. Afterwards, we checked into a hotel and left for Cullodden. In this location is a war memorial. The memorial celebrated and remembered the bravery of the Scottish fighting the English. The memorial was giant and very industrialized. We walked outside on the actual battlefield with headsets describing what had happened in the spot we were standing. This technique took the reality of the battle and masked it with theatrics and stories of people pretending to be real people during the battle on the battle field. I would have rather walked through in silence, remembering why that battle occurred, why people would resort to such lengths and the pain and sadness resulting from the battle. The indoor museum was very interesting. There were many artifacts from the battle which made it feel more real. Afterwards, we had a discussion on an article about remembering and interpreting battles. Katie and I were chosen to lead the discussion because of our communication majors. We discussed the importance of editing and how memorials can be biased if certain facts are left out. We also discussed the interpretation of the memorial and the difference of what a memorial would mean to an older Scottish person who had strong connections to the battle, as opposed to someone who knew little about the battle. It was concluded that a person with strong connections to the battle would be less likely to find the museum satisfactory, and a person who didn't know much about the battle would walk away knowing more about the battle, but less about the aftermath of the battle. We also discussed the power of agency, tourism and promotion. After the discussion we went to dinner at Dr. Cartrite's favorite Indian restaurant in then world. It was pretty good!