by John Prebble
The iron of the Ballachulish bridge touches a timbered hill on the Appin shore, by a monument that marks the spot where James Stewart was hanged in 1752. And three miles westward above the Oban road, in a dark glade of pine that has replaced the old rowan Wood of Lettermore, there is a slate cairn where he was said to have shot Colin Campbell of Glenure, the Government factor whom Stevenson called the Red Fox. James Stewart’s skeleton, picked clean by crows and bleached by the sun, swung on a gibbet above the narrows for more than two years until a January storm tore it from its chains. It was secretly buried by his kinsmen, but when attempts were made to throw the gallows timber into Loch Linnhe this was twice returned by the tide, first to a sandy bay on the Appin shore and then to another across the loch in Morvern, both of them named in memory of the Holy Cross. This coincidence was thought to be an awesome warning and the wood lay untouched for many months until a farmer, indifferent to superstition or Providence, removed it to build a bridge across a burn.
The Appin Murder is the most intriguing mystery in Highland history, but might have been unknown to the outside world had not Stevenson made it an essential part of one of the best novels written in English. James Stewart of the Glen, an industrious farmer of Appin and an unrepentant Jacobite, was undoubtedly a wretched sacrifice to Campbell vengeance, as much for the Appin Stewarts’ involvement in the recent Rebellion as for the crime he did not commit. When he was told of the murder he himself said, “Whoever be the culprit, I’ll be the victim.” He was tried at an assize court in the old church of Inveraray, in the hostile environment of Campbell country and at a moment when there were fears of another Jacobite Rising. The Duke of Argyll sat on the bench as his principal judge, and eleven of the fifteen jurors were Campbell gentlemen. Innocent too, I think, was a second man named in the indictment but never caught and tried – Stewart’s onetime ward, Alan Breck, a far less agreeable fellow than the swaggering blade in Kidnapped.
Who truly fired that murdering shot from a long Spanish gun in the Wood of Lettermore has never been determined. For a hundred years few people cared, but since Stevenson wrote his novel (“The one I’m proud of and that I delight in”) there has been a century of debate and conjecture. It is my belief, admittedly difficult to prove, that Red Colin was probably killed by one of two Camerons, Donald Roy and Dugald Roy MacOllonie, father and son1 Clan Cameron’s hatred of Campbell of Glenure was strong, despite the fact that his mother was a daughter of their greatest chief. They believed that he intended to remove many of them and replace them with others sympathetic to the Government. Evidence taken in Lochaber at the time of Stewart’s arrest stated that there had been a Cameron plot to kill the factor, and that Dugald Roy had agreed to be its instrument. Glenure had certainly not felt at ease when riding through his cousin’s land. Coming ashore from the Ballachulish ferry, and within an hour of his death, he turned in relief to his companions. “I am safe,” he said, “now that I am out of my mother’s country.” More than this – during the bloody harrying of the glens after Culloden, Donald Roy MacOllonie had been accused of a murder that was oddly similar to the killing of Red Colin six years later. An officer of the Hanoverian militia, Munro of Culcairn, was shot from his horse in the Wood of Muick on Loch Arkaigside, in revenge, it was said, for the death of one of Donald Roy’s sons. The MacOllonie was ruthlessly hunted in the mountains but never taken, although his fugitive chief, Cameron of Lochiel, appealed to him to surrender and save his clan from reprisals.
The similarities in these murders may be coincidental, but I think they can be significant. Both men were killed from a protective screen of woodland, and a braeside that made vigorous pursuit of the assassin exceedingly difficult. They were also shot at a moment when they made themselves easy targets. Munro was stationary, and Glenure had reined back his horse on the narrow path. Whether or not the MacOllonies repeated the pattern of Culcairn’s murder, this time in the Wood of Lettermore where Appin Stewarts might take the blame, I am sure Stevenson used the manner of Munro’s death for his fictional account of Glenure’s killing. Munro was shot when he stopped his horse to speak to a woman at the roadside. In Kidnapped, Glenure is hit when he is halted by the sudden appearance of David Balfour. Stevenson heard many Highland tales in his boyhood at Bridge of Allan, and as a young man when he visited the western coast with his father. Stories of the Appin Murder and Culcairn’s death were among those commonly told at cottage firesides, and I would like to think that when he heard them he too suspected that both killings were perhaps committed by the same man, Donald Roy MacOllonie alias Cameron.
As I cross the narrows and see James Stewart’s monument above me, a gnarled white stone from his farm in Appin, I occasionally think of the unconscious irony in Glenure’s words that day he stepped ashore from the ferry. And the irony, too, in the Camerons’ continuing association with this spot. Until the bridge was built, the present Cameron of Lochiel was said to be a member of the board that operated the car-ferry, and it was the gentle custom of some habitual travellers to grumble at him when the fares rose yet again. On a grey spring morning, with rain strung like fine wire from sky to loch, the ticket-seller tapped at my car window, a white face bending in an oilskin cap. I paid the fare and added a blessing upon Lochiel. “Aye,” said she in understanding, “if he had charged like this at Culloden he would have won.” Good sense, I hope, prevented me from telling Lochiel this story when I met him later. He had asked Hamish to bring me to tea at Achnacarry, there was a small error in Culloden which he hoped I would permit him to set right. We arrived late from Corrimony, a puncture having delayed us near Fort Augustus, and the residual grease on my right hand was transferred to that of Mac-Dhomnuill-Duibh as he welcomed us in his doorway. It was an English occasion, English voices at an English tea-table, and the gentle sound of gossiping water beyond the open window. We discussed the great history of the Camerons then being written by Lochiel’s brother-in-law. We examined the Jacobite relics in the old house – weapons, miniatures and faded tartan. We spoke of the Young Pretender’s lost treasure, the 30,000 louis-d’or buried somewhere along the Loch Arkaig shore, and the men who visit Achnacarry with metal detectors, hoping to find it. We talked of the cormorant seen that week, coming inland from Knoydart to take the brown trout of the loch, and the once familiar osprey which might never come again. Throughout that languid and pleasant afternoon the grievous error in my book was courteously ignored.
I have regretted the passing of the Ballachulish ferry, and others elsewhere in the Highlands, as men may once have been saddened by the loss of the old oared boats they replaced. A rocking passage across a sea-loch, enclosed in the capsule of a car, added much to the pleasures of travel, the wide sweep against the pull of the tide, the throb and smell of complaining engines, the ring of falling platforms echoing against the hills. Few of them now remain. To Skye from Lochalsh, of course, but there is always talk of the bridge to be built there, spanning the tidal race where Haakon the Norse king sailed southward to defeat at Largs, and where Daniell drew the sketches for a spirited aquatint. There is still a crossing at Corran, over Loch Linnhe to Ardgour, an exhilarating experience when the wind is stiff and the tide flows strongly. But a bridge has now replaced the Kessock ferry over the Beauly Firth to the Black Isle, and in Wester Ross, twelve years ago, a fine new road was cut along the eastern shore of Loch Carron, bringing an end to the crossing at Strome.
This was always a beautiful journey, dark water in the shadow of the twin hills that guard the narrows, a solacing climax to the long drive from Inverness. In the 18th century the loch-shore was thickly-populated, black with dry-stone cottages, green and yellow with good fields of grain. The water was famous for its shoals of herring, so plentiful, said John Knox, that they “tumbled upon the surface, and others leaped fairly out to the distance of two or three yards.” His companion fired at them with lug-shot, “but we knew not with what effect.” James Hogg came to Strome in 1803, on a Sunday morning in June, having travelled eleven miles o
ver the high pass from Kintail before breakfast. He stood angrily on the southern shore, shouting and waving his hat until the ferryman came over and agreed to take him for sixpence and a dram of whisky. Sixteen years later, when Thomas Telford finished his highway along the western shore, the ferry became the busiest in the western Highlands, linking Inverness and Dingwall with Lochalsh and the Isles. Telford’s friend, Robert Southey, travelled along this new road within a few days of its completion and was delighted to discover that his carriage was the first to reach the ferry at Strome. It was my hope to put my car on the last boat to make the crossing, but when I arrived, coming through the pass at Achnashellach to a wondrous sunset, I found the eastern road already open and the ferry-boat moored and idle. Later that year, when I came again, the boat was gone and the only movement offshore was a lone shag, straight-necked and black above the water, direct in flight and hurrying seaward to its evening rest on a rock-island beyond the narrows.
I stayed at the Ballachulish Hotel in the last days before the bridge was opened. We were filming in Glen Etive, the final location sequences for John Macnab. Every evening in the residents’lounge the director played traditional jazz, and the assistant floor-manager danced in bare feet. The public bar was full, a noisy wake for the dying car-ferry, and the centre of it was an aged boat-master in peaked cap and reefer jacket. He had spent a lifetime on Caolas Mhic Phàdruig, backward and forward, to and fro in all weathers, countless voyages of five minutes duration. But as the hour became later, noisier and more maudlin, it was easy to believe, with help from The Glenlivet, that a great deep-water sailor had come home from the sea.
A crewman of the Ballachulish ferry once helped me with my researches for Glencoe. He lived at Laroch, in a cottage by the abandoned slate quarry and below the tall cones of debris which cover the dead of a great battle fought long ago between invading Norsemen and the Gaels. The blue slate of Ballachulish was used for Argyll’s mock castle at Inveraray, and its tiles still cover the roofs of Edinburgh’s New Town. It was cut into smooth slabs to make headstones for the walled grave-yards of the Highlands, and because it resists moss, does not corrode or crumble, the inscriptions on them are sometimes as clean and deep as the day they were carved. Because of this they have often supplemented or added another dimension to information I have found in the manuscript archives of Register House or the National Library. There is a Clan Fraser burial-ground on the eastern shore of Loch Ness, not far from the high ground where patient men sometimes encamp with orange fly-tents, tape recorders, telescopes and trip-cameras. They wait for the appearance of a monster which surely could not have the impudence to show itself, not since Saint Columba drove it back into the loch fourteen hundred years ago, with the Sign of the Cross and a stentorian warning, “Think not to go further …!” Within a decaying vault of the burial-ground lies a man who died early in the last century, advanced in age, graced with honours and greatly esteemed. A week before I found his neglected grave, at that time almost hidden by a loving growth of birch and rowan, I had been reading about him in a memoir of the last Jacobite Rebellion. On April 16, 1746, he and his friends played truant from their tutor at Petty. They climbed to the spine of Culloden Moor, hid themselves in the wet heather and watched as their fathers and the men of their clans charged into the smoke of cannon and musketry.
I had been told that the ferryman of Ballachulish had a small boat and would willingly row me out to Eilean Mhunna. This is the largest of a cluster of green islands in Loch Leven, a burial-ground once shared by the MacDonalds of Glencoe and the Camerons of Callart. Some of the stones of an oratory built by Saint Mundus in the 7th century are still there, and also the broken walls of the MacDonald grave-yard where the slaughtered MacIain and his wife were buried by their sons. The ferryman was at his mid-day meal when I called, and he agreed to row me out to the isle if I would first help him to bale out his boat. We did so in the cold sunshine of the spring afternoon, with sea-pie foraging in the shallows a few yards away, high-stepping on long pink legs. The ferryman was a Gaelic-speaker. His family had lived on Lochlevenside for generations and he was much attached to it and its past, although he cared little for the Massacre, believing its importance exaggerated by people living outwith the district. It was he who first directed my attention to Carness as the site of the old ferry. He said it was still used “not long ago”, in the Highland way of meaning yester-year or a century since. And perhaps it was, but a map in my 18th-century copy of The Trial of James Stewart indicates that by 1752 boats were already crossing the narrows at Caolas Mhic Phàdruig. We were joined at the baling by the ferryman’s daughter, a child of twelve or less. As we talked of the past – fishing, farming, and stalking, and kinsmen lost in two terrible wars – she sang Beatle songs and cupped the water in white hands studded with scarlet nail-varnish. No doubt she is long gone from her ancestors’land. The seductive appeal of southern society draws young people from the Highlands, and although it is said that they come back in wistful middle-age, I doubt if it is often true.
Of the many visits I paid to Glencoe, the longest was for three weeks. I spent some of the time walking on the braes above the old road, and I went again to the ruins of Maclain’s summer house in Gleann-leac-na-muidhe. But often I sat for hours watching the valley’s changing moods, the sunlight that breaks through the cloud and floods the wall of Aonach Eagach with shimmering gold, the grey plaids of moving mist on the shoulders of the Three Sisters, the blue and silent dusk that joins day to night. I ate cheese and bread on a rock by the Meeting of the Waters, peat-brown foam and waves of black metal. Victoria had lunched here ninety years before and been much put out to discover that “impudently inquisitive reporters” were watching her through telescopes. John Brown was sent to disperse them, which he did with strong words and a willingness to use his fists, but their presence quite spoilt the Queen’s day. “Such conduct,” she told her diary, “ought to be made known.” She had the customary feeling of horror Glencoe is supposed to inspire, but I have never found it oppressive, perhaps because I became its familiar friend and felt some of the love it once inspired in its vanished people. In winter, it is true, it can become a roaring funnel for cruel winds and driving snow. It once pleased the Picture Editor of the Scottish Daily Express to have me photographed there, toward dusk in February and on the anniversary of the Massacre. Nature obliged with a sudden squall of snow and sleet, and neither I nor the cameraman (a Glasgow man with a Highland name, of course) could endure more than three minutes outside the warmth of the car. But in summer I can understand the 17th-century traveller who said the valley was “a garden enclosed”, and another who discovered that it was “fertile, plenteous of corn, milk and butter.” I have tried to ignore the broad road that brings traffic from the south, and imagine the years when Loch Leven was white with the silver scales of herring, when there were abundant trout in the little loch by Achtriachtan, red deer coming down from the high braes, and wild flowers where caravans are now parked at Achnacone.
I was told at the Kingshouse Inn that Mr MacDonald in Glen Orchy was a descendant of MacIain’s people, and that he possessed an ancient account of the Massacre, as well as knowing much folklore as yet unpublished. My informant was not certain where he lived, but it was in Glen Orchy to be sure, and a patient man like myself would have no difficulty in finding him, if not today then tomorrow, or the day after, perhaps.
I drove by Rannoch to Bridge of Orchy and south-westward through the glen, on a winding single-track that idles for fourteen miles over and about the hummocked earth, or beside the oak and ash that shadow its white-stoned river. I called at farm by farm and at each I was told that Mr MacDonald lived in the glen, but not there. Two hundred years before, Thomas Pennant had travelled along this same road, looking for a blacksmith called MacNab whose family had lived in Glen Orchy since 1440, when they wrought much of the iron used to build the Campbell castle on Loch Awe. Pennant found MacNab, as I at last found Mr MacDonald, a short, sharp-eyed man in shirt s
leeves. He invited me in to take a dram with him and promised that when we had finished it, and perhaps another, and any conversation we might have while passing the time so agreeably, he would show me the desired account of the Massacre. And so, at last, he did, a pamphlet published by the National Trust for Scotland and prepared by my lamented friend Iain Cameron Taylor. I think Mr MacDonald may now be dead, but if he is not I hope he continues to commemorate the anniversary of the Massacre in his individual way. It is the custom for the Episcopalian minister of the parish to hold a morning service at Invercoe on the thirteenth day of February, after which there is a laying of wreaths below the cross that inaccurately marks “the site of the Massacre”. Mr MacDonald and a few close friends, however, were usually there long before this, at midnight with a hand’s-clasp of fresh flowers and a bottle of whisky. They stayed until the whisky was gone and then made their several ways homeward, in the dark and in the cold.
Loch Leven and the entrance to Glencoe are at the southern end of Glen Mor, the Great Glen sometimes called Glen Albyn, a long trench from sea to sea, dividing the northern Highlands historically as well as geologically. Looking at a map, it can be seen how the land-mass to the north-west shifted in some timeless moment, like the palm of one hand drawn across another. The Great Glen is thus a fault, a curious term when taken literally, as if geologists believe that the earth should have a proper balance and symmetry, and where it does not Providence has faltered. The countless millennia during which the Great Glen was formed, the terrible noise, burning colour and boiling rock, are incomprehensible, but there are times in the stillness of a storm above the mountains of the Monadhliath, or the blue peaks of Kintail, when it is possible to believe that the great convulsion of Creation has only paused, and will shortly continue its meaningless frenzy. Until the beginning of the last century the high ground of Knoydart and Morvern to the north-west of the glen was still known as Garbhchriochan, the Rough Bounds, a wild, inaccessible and sometimes inhospitable land. Those few travellers who entered it cursed it for breaking the wheels of their carriages or the legs of their saddle-horses. Even when its Gaelic people were gone to the slums of Glasgow or the emigrant ships at Isle Ornsay its new owners – brewers, drapers, lordlings and gentry from the south – visited their playgrounds by water, by side-wheel steamers to Loch Aline, Sunart and Loch Hourn. The stones and slate, bricks and sand, furnishings, furniture and food for the grand houses they built also came by sea, and in the high glens of the Rough Bounds the sheep which made all this possible now grazed above the deserted townships and the abandoned drove road through Glen Geal to Strontian.
