Across Scotland in the footsteps of Bonnie Prince Charlie

The small boat bounced up the coast of South Uist, spray-battered, through a world of grey. Rock-scarred mountains towered to our left and, 30 miles away across the steely depths of the Minch, the cliffs of Skye fenced the horizon.

We were on a quest to find the cave at Corodale, where 276 years ago Bonnie Prince Charlie — the last serious Stuart claimant to the British throne — spent three weeks in hiding. He was the target of the largest manhunt Britain had ever seen, dodging nine British men-of-war scouring the Minch and hundreds of Redcoat government troops on land.

“It’s like the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” explained an ex-Special Boat Service friend. “As escape and evasion goes, it’s off the scale.” Like bin Laden, the prince was protected by the loyalty of mountain tribesmen: handed from clan to clan, sleeping in caves, climbing mountains, wading rivers, crawling past enemy troops in the dead of night, with torture, death and ruin awaiting his helpers. Like bin Laden, he had a vast price on his head: £30,000 — equivalent to £5mn today.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, aka the Young Pretender, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in July 1745 at Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides, hoping to win back the crown his grandfather James II of England and VII of Scotland had lost in 1688, in a revolution engendered by his Catholicism. The Stuarts, with their Jacobite supporters, had already tried several times to win it back but by the 1740s, backed by Louis XV, Catholic king of France, they saw another chance.

Despite coming with only seven men and little money, the 24-year-old prince raised an army of Highlanders through sheer charisma. They took Scotland and marched as far south as Derby before — to Charles’s horror — his Highland chieftains, far from their supply lines and worried by the failure of support from the English, insisted on turning back. They also had different strategic aims to the prince’s. While many chiefs wanted an independent Scotland, a return to the power they had wielded before the Act of Union in 1707, the Stuarts wanted the British crown.

Over the next few months, to the prince’s despair, his army retreated further into their mountains, despite winning several battles along the way, until their first — but decisive — defeat at Culloden on April 16 1746, the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil.

We were following the route of the prince’s escape after Culloden: 530 miles, over five months, much of it on foot. He travelled across some of the most beautiful scenery in the world: sea lochs, mountains and forests that are home to stags and golden eagles, landscapes rich with stories of monsters or lost gold, and the white sands of the Outer Hebrides.

We were driving — because I’m 55 with a dodgy ankle, and not a…