On a sunny June day in Edinburgh, I went to see where my ancestor lost his head. A bagpiper in full regalia played tunes on the Royal Mile, and tourists took selfies beneath the castle, as I surveyed the scene at the Mercat Cross—the site where, on March 26, 1697, Sir Godfrey McCulloch was one of the last people beheaded by the Maiden, a grisly device that forced the doomed to face upwards to watch the falling blade.
The incident, referred to as the “unfortunate business” on the McCulloch clan website, is cloaked in lore and legend: Some say his headless body ran 100 yards; the legendary Scottish historian and writer Sir Walter Scott claimed that McCulloch was in fact saved by a fairy. In any case, after the execution, McCulloch’s wife and children were forced to flee to Ireland, where the family name morphed into McCullough, before emigrating to the US. Their descendants, as is common in the Scotch-Irish diaspora, are spread across North America.
Intrigued by this branch of my family tree, I’d long planned to make an ancestral pilgrimage. I’m not alone in my curiosity: ancestry travel is soaring in popularity thanks to DNA kits, TV shows like Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots, and the genealogy research that became a COVID pastime for many. This year, when my mom turned 75, I decided it was the perfect occasion for my sister and me to plan a surprise adventure to Scotland.
Our trip to the homeland would not be about reveling in the soul-stirring scenery of the Highlands—not the bonnie banks of lochs, the mist-shrouded munros, or the cinematic landscapes of Outlander. Instead, our travels would take us to the untouristed southern region of Dumfries and Galloway, once part of the lawless borderlands plagued by banditry and bloody feuds. So violent in the Middle Ages, as historian Graham Robb described in The Debatable Lands, that neither the English nor Scottish kings could control its people.
