The word Darien is a scar on the memory of Scots. This is a detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from original sources in the records of the Company, the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn William Paterson's dream into reality.

In the terrible aftermath of the moorland battle of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs. Following his magnificent reconstruction of Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands. 'Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of...

'You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy.' This was the treacherous and cold-blooded order ruthlessly carried out on 13 February 1692, when the Campbells slaughtered their hosts the MacDonalds at the Massacre of Glencoe. It was a bloody incident which had deep repercussions and was the beginning of the destruction of the Highlanders. John Prebble's masterly description of the terrible events at Glencoe was praised as 'Evocative and powerful' in the Sunday Telegraph.

This text, using contemporary memoirs, letters, newspapers and regimental order books, reconstructs the common man's version of the Moorland Battle and the repression and brutality that followed it for the highlanders. It challenges the rose-tinted legend of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Culloden.