I got lost yesterday and failed to find Cluny’s Cage or its equivalent, due to inclement weather and some softy-southerner map reading.

I did, though, get the full ‘moor’ experience and came to understand what kind of mileage one can expect to make across this terrain. I walked roughly 13 miles stopping quite lot to film and stare at a soggy map and rave like King Lear on the heath (or was it more like Donald Crowhurst maybe?).

A lot of the time there was no clear path so I really was yomping across the heather. To my mind, then, all the distances described in the book are perfectly possible.

On a serious sombre note, as I walked alone I had a lot of time to think, and thanks to the book and to Trevor and to Twitter I ended up thinking about the death of Scottish soldiers in Afghanistan:

‘Kidnapped’ has a lot to say about soldiery, and even today British military life & history is very much woven into the Scottish psyche, no? We’ve used up a *lot* of young Scottish men over the centuries ‘for King/Queen & Country’.

I was also intrigued to note that Cluny’s way of life as described in the book is uncannily like that of Bin Laden’s:

“This was but one of Cluny’s hiding-places; he had caves, besides, and underground chambers in several parts of his country; and following the reports of his scouts, he moved from one to another as the soldiers drew near or moved away. By this manner of living, and thanks to the affection of his clan, he had not only stayed all this time in safety, while so many others had fled or been taken and slain.”

So Alan and the rest of the Jacobites are terrorists then, are they? David is hanging out with terrorists, and finding them to be not so bad after all.

Is that the message we take from this section of the book? Perhaps we should refer to Alan, Cluny et al as ‘freedom fighters’.

p.s. Big thank you to @LittleOnion for sharing this link to a website that teaches you the proper way to guddle a trout: http://bit.ly/9rlgn.

*Please note all the Kidnapped posts have been transferred here from the original blog at https://timwright.typepad.com/kidmapper which no longer exists.

I have archived the comments from the original site but have not included them here. If you have any queries about this project, do get in touch.