Scottish-American Military Society Post 2 "Post of the Potomac"

07/15/2026

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🏔️ In 1993 a group of Highland crofters did something no one thought possible. They bought their own land back.

The place is Assynt in Sutherland, a wilderness of bog and lochan out of which the mountain Suilven rises like the prow of a ship. The rock underneath it, Lewisian gneiss, is around three billion years old. It is the oldest rock in Britain and among the oldest exposed on the surface of the earth. Standing there, you are standing on a piece of the world that existed before there was anything alive on it.

The people of Assynt had been tenants on that ground for generations, and their families before them had been cleared off better ground to get there. Then in the early nineties the estate was put up for sale by a company in liquidation, and the crofters were listed as an asset. Not consulted. Listed. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

So they formed a trust, raised the money from donations across Scotland and the diaspora, and bought the estate themselves. Twenty one thousand acres. For the first time in centuries the people who worked that land owned it.

It changed everything. What Assynt started became the community land movement, and today great stretches of the Highlands and Islands are owned by the people who actually live on them. Eigg, Gigha, Knoydart, the Isle of Lewis. The Clearances ran for a hundred years. The buying back has only been going for thirty.

They were cleared off this land with dogs and fire, and their great grandchildren queued up in a village hall and bought it. 💚

07/13/2026

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Tossing a telegraph pole across a field looks absurd until you know why it started. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

The Braemar Gathering in Aberdeenshire is the most famous Highland games in the world, and its roots go back a very long way. Tradition holds that King Malcolm Canmore staged contests on the Braes of Mar in the eleventh century, a hill race up Creag Choinnich, to find the fastest runner in the kingdom and make him his royal messenger.

That is what the games really were. Not a festival. A selection process. Chiefs needed to know who could run, who could carry, who could throw, who could last. The strongest men in the glen were identified in public and remembered.

And the caber, that great tapered larch trunk, is not thrown for distance at all, which surprises almost everyone. It is thrown for accuracy. You must flip it end over end so it lands and falls straight away from you, in the twelve o'clock position. It is a test of precision under enormous load. Nobody is certain of its origin, but the likeliest answer is the most practical one: men who had to move felled timber and bridge burns learned to do it well, and then competed at it.

Today there is the heavy hammer, the stone put, the tug of war, Highland dancing, and a massed pipe band that fills the whole hollow with sound. The reigning monarch has attended Braemar for generations.

But strip away the royal box and the tourists and the tea tents, and it is still a glen watching its own people show what they can do.

That is not a show. That is a community remembering itself out loud. 🤍

06/26/2026

Here's wishing ye all a safe but grand Independence Day/250th Birthday! May we continue to cherish our freedom and defend it as our ancestors and Forefathers did so well!

06/18/2026

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🥃 They called it the water of life — uisge beatha in Gaelic, the phrase that became wh**ky in English through the compression of centuries of pronunciation. The Highlanders who made it in hidden stills above their burns in the early nineteenth century were not making contraband. They were making food — a crop-based spirit that was simultaneously a preservation of surplus grain, a medium of exchange, a medicine, and a cultural inheritance from a distilling tradition stretching back at least to the fifteenth century. That the government had decided this activity required a licence and a tax payment was, from their perspective, entirely the government's problem.

Illicit distilling in the Highlands was not fringe criminality. It was a mainstream economic activity that supported communities across a vast area of northern and western Scotland through the period when the Clearances were simultaneously removing the other economic foundations of Highland life. The wash for the wh**ky was made from barley grown in the infields, the still was heated with peat cut from the bog above, the product was consumed locally and traded with drovers and merchants who moved through the glens on the cattle routes. Every element of the process was connected to the local economy and the local landscape.

The Excise Act of 1823 — pushed through Parliament largely by the Duke of Gordon and shaped by the knowledge that illicit distilling was too widespread to be effectively suppressed — made legal distilling financially viable by reducing the duty and simplifying the licence requirements. It was the act that created the modern Scotch wh**ky industry. The illicit tradition that preceded it — the tradition of the hidden Highland still, the copper pot above the burn, the peat smoke kept minimal to avoid the revenue men — was the seed from which the legal industry grew.

The single malt Scotch wh**ky that the world now pays extraordinary sums for is the direct descendant of the drink those two men were making in a hollow above a Highland burn, hiding it from the tax collector, calling it the water of life because that is exactly what it was.

05/18/2026

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Happy World Wh**ky Day! Slàinte 🥃🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

04/06/2026

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A momentous anniversary from Scotand.

03/05/2026

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On this day in 1811, a 62 year old Scottish widower led one of the most astonishing battlefield upsets of the Napoleonic Wars.

Thomas Graham of Balgowan was never meant to be a soldier. He was a wealthy Perthshire laird whose life revolved around his wife, Mary Cathcart, the elegant woman immortalised in the Thomas Gainsborough’s famous full-length portrait.

But in 1792, Mary tragically died of consumption while they were travelling in France. Heartbroken, Thomas placed her in a sealed casket and hired a barge to bring her home to Scotland.

But as they neared Toulouse, a mob of French Revolutionary Guards stopped them.
Ignoring his desperate pleas, they brutally smashed open Mary's coffin and desecrated her remains to search for smuggled valuables.

Thomas Graham returned to Scotland and made a cold, terrifying vow.
He was going to kill as many Frenchmen as he possibly could.

In his mid forties, an age when most men were retiring, Graham joined the army and raised his own Scottish military regiment, the 90th Foot, entirely at his own expense.

He taught himself warfare.
He proved to be a ruthless, brilliant commander, rapidly rising through the ranks to become one of the Duke of Wellington's most trusted generals.

Then came 5 March 1811.

Now 62 years old, General Graham was commanding a British force near Cádiz in Spain when his Spanish allies suddenly retreated, leaving him completely trapped by a massive French army at the Battle of Barrosa.

The French held the high ground. They had the numbers. They expected Graham to surrender or flee.

Instead, Graham drew his sword and ordered a devastating, blind-rage uphill bayonet charge directly into the teeth of the French guns.

In savage, brutal close fighting, Graham's outnumbered men absolutely shattered two elite French divisions.
In the chaos, they captured the French Imperial Eagle of the 8th Ligne, the very first eagle captured by the British in the entire Peninsular War, complete with a solid gold wreath awarded by Napoleon Bonaparte himself.

A grieving Scot had just stolen Napoleon's favorite trophy.

It was one of the most stunning tactical victories of the Peninsular War

Thomas Graham lived to be 95 years old.
For half a century, he never remarried, wearing his wedding ring until the day he died.
When his will was read, Mary's portrait was donated to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.

But Graham attached one legally binding condition.
She must never, ever leave Scotland.

A reminder that you should never, ever stand between a grieving Scot and his revenge. ⚔️💔

02/11/2026

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02/07/2026

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