Looking at historic maps of Scotland, you will see the land represented is peppered with crosses, marking the sites of battles and murders. Many of these locations are said to be haunted.
The whole country was once blood-drenched, reeking with violent feuds, death and treachery. A cycle of violence and wars wracked the land as clans murdered each other, sold each other out in vendettas spanning generations, or battled with the Northumbrians or the English. Scotland during this unhappy chapter of its past resembled Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, parts of the Middle East and more recently what we hear from Ukraine. From out of this litany of bloody crimes it is the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 that remains particularly remembered, marked each 13 February in the village near its occurrence by a church service, a wreath laying ceremony and a parade of mourning. It, too, is long claimed to have left ghostly echoes.
On 13 February 1692, nearly 40 members of the Macdonald clan were slaughtered by Scottish Government soldiers for being late in pledging allegiance to the Crown, following the collapse of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1689-90. The new monarchs, William III and Mary II, displaced James II, to whom many in the Highlands remained loyal. Consolidating its rule in Scotland, the Crown offered an amnesty to clan chiefs sweetened with a £12,000 payment in return for taking an oath of allegiance by 1 January 1692, or else face terrible consequences.
Because of arguments over the divisionof the money, most chiefs did not sign until December 1691. When Alasdair Ruadh MacIain MacDonald of Glencoe went to Fort William on New Year’s Eve to sign, he was told by its commander, Colonel John Hill, he had come to the wrong place, as Sir Colin Campbell the magistrate was absent, and he should go to Inveraray. MacIain hurried south, but was delayed by bad weather, only managing to sign his oath five days after the deadline.
