Lead buck and ball shotNational Trust for Scotland
Posted on 11/04/2025 6:50:56 PM PST by SunkenCiv
BBC News reports that more than 100 projectiles were recovered during an investigation of an unstudied area of Scotland's Culloden Battlefield. Fought on April 16, 1746, the Battle of Culloden marked Britain's final defeat of the Jacobite army led by Charles Edward Stuart, who was also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie. Stuart had attempted to place his father, who was the son of the Roman Catholic James II, on the British throne. Yet James II had been deposed in 1688 and his line excluded from English succession under the Act of Settlement of 1701. At the time of the battle, the Jacobite army controlled large parts of Scotland, but had been forced out of England and was running low on supplies. Many of the recently recovered projectiles are made of lead and are thought to have been fired by 150 Irish troops who blocked charging British horsemen, allowing thousands of Jacobites to escape. "A more detailed analysis of the artifacts and their distribution pattern will be required before we can make a definitive statement but at present there are no obvious alternative interpretations," said Tony Pollard of Glasgow University. For more on battlefield archaeology in Scotland, go to "After the Battle."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
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Lead buck and ball shotNational Trust for Scotland
Cavalry became obsolete with the widespread adoption of cartridge rifles.
Horses remained valuable for transport through WWI, and were used extensively through WWII by Germany and others.
But as a fighting force, cartridge rifles made horse cavalry obsolete, as the cavalry charge became a suicide mission.
In 1942 an Italian cavalry unit charged a Soviet army unit armed with Katyusha (Kathy) rocket launchers—and won the battle.
“Fought on April 16, 1746, the Battle of Culloden marked Britain’s final defeat of the Jacobite army led by Charles Edward Stuart, who was also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
We spent a couple days in the Highlands in August. We stayed in Fort William, 70 miles SW of Culloden. It was there that the final siege of Fort William ended on April 3, 1746, just 13 days before Culloden. We hiked the Waters of Nevis (River Nevis or Glen Nevis), but this wasn’t the route taken by the army.
Nice!
Yup, and there’s an old saying about that, you go to war and may get your ass shot off with the army you have.
The basically universal adoption of tractors for farm work in this area was delayed by WWII. There were of course those who had changed over, but tractors were hard or impossible to get in the early 1940s. I remember someone saying to a much younger me that Ford was first to introduce live power (where the PTO runs all the time) right after the war. That kind of checks out, the small tractor my late father used didn’t have it and was made in the 1930s. He sold it in the ‘90s, but there’s reason to believe it’s still in use.
A building that still stands on a major street on the NW side of Grand Rapids was a saddle livery shoeing place until the mid-1940s, because travel by horseback or horsedrawn was still happening during the war years.
Well, I guess I went on a bit.
You did ... and it was very interesting.
Those Hoyt-Clagwells will run forever with good maintenance.
I find very old musket balls all the time, but never considered it newsworthy.
Thanks!
😆 🚜
Where do you find them? I find the estimates of lead thrown on the Battle Road retreat of the British from Lexington and Concord back to Boston interesting. Estimates are 15,000 to 18,000 rounds fired weighing 500 pounds. That’s a lot of lead!
I can find them all over Japan in hills and areas that have remained wild. I have many different sizes. It’s fun analyze them based on where they were found, size, damage, etc., and think about why they were where I found them. Most I assume were for hunting boar, deer and bear, but some of the larger ones could well have been fired in defense of castles.
Whiff of the Grape?.............
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