← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:29]
Maddy Pelling
Acast Powers the world's best podcasts.
- [00:33]
Anthony Delaney
Here's a show that we recommend.
- [00:37]
Nikayla Matthews Akome
If you've ever dreamed of quitting your job to take your side hustle full time, listen up. This is Nikayla Matthews Akome, host of side Hustle Pro, a podcast that helps you build and grow from passion project to profitable business. Every week you'll hear from guests just like you who wanted to start a business on the side.
- [00:55]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
If you can't run a side Hustle.
- [00:56]
Maddy Pelling
You can't run a business.
- [00:57]
Nikayla Matthews Akome
They share real tips and so I started connecting with all these people on LinkedIn and I saw Target supplier diversity was having office hours. Real advice. Procrastination is the easiest form of resistance and the actual strategies they use to turn their side hustle into their main hustle. Getting back in touch with your tangible cash and sitting down and learning to give your money a job like it changes something. Check out side Hustle Pro every week on your favorite podcast app and YouTube.
- [01:27]
Maddy Pelling
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
- [01:45]
Anthony Delaney
It has the logic of a nightmare to it. Trapped between those ragged peaks in that glen, in the cold dark of winter before dawn, McKeon, clan chief of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, is asleep in his bed. When he hears a commotion. He rises and is hit twice by musket balls. Further into the glen, eight men huddle around a fire for warmth. When they are attacked, we see nine men bound at the feet of Captain Glenlyon, whose only picture shows him with a beautiful white cravat. Did it get bloody when the prisoners were executed? When he failed to stop a child screaming for merc from being put to the sword? Up and down the dark glen before the sun rose, the killing time, the dying time, raged fire and screaming. But how did this happen? What should we call this? Who concocted this nightmare? Who is to blame? And how can we seek to make sense of this hellish history of the Massacre of Glencoe?
- [03:18]
Maddy Pelling
Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.
- [03:21]
Anthony Delaney
And I'm Anthony.
- [03:22]
Maddy Pelling
And today we are concluding our story of the Massacre of Glencoe. Last week we introduced Glencoe, the place and its inhabitants, the MacDonalds who lived there. We heard about why the Scottish government sent soldiers to the glen to live among the macdonalds. We heard the horrific orders that captain Glenlyon received on the evening before the massacre, instructing him to kill every MacDonald of Glencoe under the age of 70. This then brings us to the massacre itself. And in this episode, we're going to talk about what happened and why it happened. Our returning guest is Dr. Alan Kennedy from the University of Dundee. Alan is a historian who studies the social and political history of 17th century Scotland, and his new book, serious crime in late 17th century Scotland, will be available too. Alan, I cannot wait for this book to come out. I'm so excited. Welcome back to after dark.
- [04:18]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
Thank you. Lovely to be back, and thank you for having me.
- [04:21]
Maddy Pelling
You're very welcome. So let's dive straight in. We're on the 13th of February now. What happens on the 13th of February, Alan? Because it comes so quickly and for everyone involved, it seems relatively unexpected, and yet here we are in the early hours, and it's brutal what happens next, isn't it?
- [04:43]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
It is. It's brutal and it's very swift. Basically, in a nutshell, what happens is at 5 o'clock, the troops under the command of Campbell of Glenlyon, there's about 120 of them, muster and then immediately fan out throughout the settlements through Glen Coe with the simple instruction to kill everybody that they can find. And what seems to happen over the next couple of hours is that they just break into all of the houses, all of the homes they can find, hunt down anybody they can find who's not indoors, and kill them in all sorts of creative ways. And some of them are shot, some of them are bludgeons to death, some of them are bayoneted. But it is basically a slaughter. There's no other way to describe it. And lasts for a couple of hours. By mid morning, Glenlyon's troops are reinforced with further Scottish troops who are sent to the glen. There's probably several hundred troops by mid morning in Glencoe, but by that point, it's all over. Up to 40 of the MacDonalds have been killed in these various ways. The Rest of the MacDonalds of Glencoe have all fled. There had been orders given to these troops to seal all the exits from the glen so that people didn't escape. But either they didn't do it sufficiently well, or there were exits they weren't aware of for whatever reason. A lot of the MacDonalds do escape, but it basically means that Glencoe is, by about midday on 13 February is an empty, smoking ruin. And that is all the work of these troops who started at 5:00 that morning.
- [06:07]
Anthony Delaney
I'm reminded, I suppose, of the words which you will have heard in the first episode, and if you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen to it before we proceed here, because there's an awful lot of context that is necessary to get a greater sense of this history. But those words went. You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and put all to the sword under 70. You are to have a special care that the old fox and his sons do, upon no account, escape your hands. You are to secure all the avenues that no man escapes. Escape. This you are to put in execution at five of the clock precisely. So this is what you're talking about, Alan. These are the orders, as they've simply become known. It was very specific that these things were to take place in a certain way. Now we have to get to the point where this massacre has taken place. Why were these orders given? And who is responsible for this? I would imagine this is probably a relatively complex question in some ways.
- [07:09]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
It is, absolutely. And it takes us back to the aftermath of the first Jacobite rising, to which the Glencoe massacre is sort of a grisly coda in some ways, because William and William of Orange's government, which has now defeated the Jacobites, has to decide how are we going to reimpose order in Scotland, how are we going to ensure that there is not another rising? And one of the ideas that seems to emerge as a way of achieving that is, is to visit exemplary punishment on somebody, one of the Jacobite clans, in order to prove that it's a bad idea to cross King William and to come out in support of the ex King James. For all the reasons we talked about in the last episode, the MacDonalds of Glencoe emerge as really good candidates for that role of sacrificial lamb because of their bad reputation and crucially, because of the fact that the chief had missed the deadline for swearing the oath of allegiance to King William. So what seems to happen, then, is that William issues orders in January of 1692 to treat the MacDonalds with the utmost severity, to punish them for their adherence to the rebellion and for not taking the oath of allegiance in time. And then at some point between William issuing those orders and the final orders being issued to Glenlyon, we have that general unspecific order for severity morphing into this very Specific order to massacre the MacDonalds of Glaco. And the big question, of course, is, how does that happen? Who's responsible for it? And there's lots of people who clearly have a role to play here, not just King William, but Major Robert Duncanson, who's the commanding officer of Glenlyon, who writes the orders. Clearly he's involved in some way. There are also suggestions that various senior politicians in Scotland, particularly the Earl of Argyll and the Earl of Bradalbyn, two very senior noblemen from the Campbell family, there are rumours that they are influencing government policy on this. But the man who is usually in the frame, the one who, if we can identify anybody, who is to blame for the massacre of Glencoe, the man who is usually mentioned is John Dalrymple, Master of Stair, who is William's Secretary of State, so one of his senior ministers, highly ambitious. And the argument is, or the suggestion is that he seizes on the MacDonalds as a mechanism to bolster his own position and his own reputation as a pillar of the Williamite establishment. So the suggestion is that it is him who is responsible for taking these rather unspecific orders of Williams, hardening them up and ensuring that the final orders issued to the troops are this very clear instruction for a massacre. We can't be certain about that. There's no letter lying around in which Stair writes down, I am responsible for this, or anything like that. But on the balance of the evidence, the suggestion of most historians is that if there is somebody who is to blame, it's probably the master of Stair for manipulating the situation to ensure that the massacre takes place.
- [10:12]
Maddy Pelling
It's such tantalizing history, isn't it, that there's that transformation of these orders as they go through these different hands, and that by the time they do reach Glenlyon, they are these very specific and very, very brutal and absolute instructions. Alan, you mentioned in the action of that morning just how violent and efficient, I suppose, the killing is. But you've got people being shot, you've got people being bludgeoned and beaten to death, you've got homes being burned down. From the troops point of view, the military point of view, is this an efficient action that is carried out, or is there some element of chaos? Do they meet resistance? Is this just a terrible bloodbath, you know, that's being fought face to face, fist to fist, or is this something a bit more mechanical?
- [11:03]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
From one perspective, it is efficient in that there doesn't seem to be much evidence of resistance, certainly sustained resistance. I think we can Assume that probably individual actions, you know, in specific farmsteads or specific households would have encountered some degree of resistance. But generally speaking, the soldiers seem able to perform their duty, if we can call it that, with kind of minimal fuss. And it's all over by mid morning, so it's a couple of hours work and it's complete. From that perspective, I suppose it is militarily an efficient operation. From another perspective, though, it's deeply inefficient because of course, the orders were not kill a few of the McDonald's and let the rest escape. The orders were kill them all. And that clearly does not happen. The vast majority of the McDonald's escape the massacre. There's probably most. Estimates suggest something like 200 families living in Glencoe, and only about up to 40 people are killed. So it's a small number, small proportion who actually die as a result of the action. So from that perspective, no, it's not an efficient operation because so many people get away. But in terms of the actual, you know, the action itself, it's swift, it's brutal, it's bloody, and it seems to be sufficiently surprising that there is not much opportunity for anybody to mount significant resistance to it.
- [12:19]
Maddy Pelling
Would this have happened if the MacDonalds had lived in the Lowlands? Is this taking place because they exist within that Highland culture and that's part of their identity?
- [12:30]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
Bluntly, yes. I think the fact that this is a Highland family is crucial for allowing the massacre to take place. I think it is almost unthinkable that William's government would have performed this sort of action against a Lowland family, just as it's unthinkable that we'd have done this against an English family who were Jacobite in sympathy. It's, however, not unthinkable that William would have done this against an Irish Jacobite family, for example. And I think that hints at this the importance of the kind of long standing discourse of incivility that is attached to Highlanders by Lowlanders, by Scottish governments, and after 1707, it will be attached by British governments as well. The idea that these people are barbaric, that they are borderline uncivilized, and that they are just, you just can't trust them. They will never be loyal, they will never be law abiding citizens. Those kind of stereotypes and prejudices mean that this sort of action is conceivable in the Highlands in a way that I don't think would be conceivable in London, Scotland, or in. Or in England or in much of an inverted comma, civilized Europe. In this period. This is not the kind of action that is typically being performed by governments by the late 17th century in Europe. The fact that it's happening here in Glencoe is very significantly, I think, a testament to the significant prejudice with which Highlanders are struggling throughout this period.
- [13:53]
Anthony Delaney
One of the most interesting parts of that prejudice for me is, and I guess this is new to me in many ways, but the ways in which that is coming from within Scotland as well. The other aspect that strikes me, as you said, you know, that there were quite a few families that escaped this, and we want to come on to talking about how we now remember this massacre. But before I do, I'm just intrigued to know, before we come on to the remember the act of remembrance, how those people who escaped may have informed some of the. So, like, I'm assuming these people are then telling their stories quite quickly, and how that story is. Is informing the history that we now tell. So what. What was the line was taken quite quickly from the people who escaped. Do we know? Do we have any trace of that?
- [14:40]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
We don't have much evidence for that kind of very early circulation of narratives about Glencoe. It actually seems that the government manages to kind of keep a lid on it within Scotland for a few months. The news breaks actually in Paris. The first public news about the Massacre of Glencoe is a Jacobite pamphlet published in Paris, which gives an account of the massacre. And it's that which seems to kind of blow the lid off the situation in Scotland. And then by the end of 1692, you're seeing multiple pamphlets and other pieces of literature being produced giving accounts of the massacre. It's not clear where the information in these accounts are coming from. It might be that some of the escaped MacDonalds are telling stories which are percolating through to printing presses in Edinburgh or London or whatever. These stories might equally be coming from soldiers or from other witnesses who had heard about the massacre. So we don't know exactly how the story percolates. What we do know is that by the end of 1692, everyone knows that this has happened. And that will eventually become a very significant, what we might call anachronistically, public relations problem for William, because just that William is the champion of Protestant Europe. He's the liberator of people oppressed by the Catholic tyranny of Louis XIV of France. For him to be responsible for this kind of action is a very serious image problem for him. And by the end of 1692, the word is out there and he can't escape.
- [16:02]
Maddy Pelling
That problem in the years, the decades, the centuries since this massacre, Alan, there have been so many myths and narratives and layers added to this. One of the sort of most prevalent among these is this idea that the massacre has some root in a feud with another neighbouring clan. Right. Clan Campbell. Can you tell us a little bit about how that aspect of the history maybe has. Has kind of emerged from. From this?
- [16:31]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
Yes, absolutely. This is. This is one of the most persistent, I suppose, misunderstandings about the massacre. And it feeds into a genuine history of conflict between Clan Campbell, which is a very powerful Highland stroke. Lowland family kind of cross. Both culture zones in the southwest of the Highlands, led by the Campbells of Argyll, the earls, marquesses, Dukes of Argyll, and various actually Highland clans, including the MacDonalds. There have been a long history of tension between these groups, really going back to the later Middle Ages. So this is not a new phenomenon and it is a genuine fault line within Scottish and heightened history. The problem with Glencoe is that although the Campbells are tangentially involved in this, I mean, Glenlyon himself is a Campbell, but he's not there as a Campbell. He's there as a Scottish government soldier. And a lot of the troops seem to have come from Campbell country, from the kind of Argyll area. There are also suggestions that the Campbell nobleman, the Earl of Argyll and the Earl of Bredalban, are somehow involved in pushing this massacre forward. Although that's really rumour more than anything else. But although the Campbells are there, they're part of the story in a broader sense. They are not the ones pushing forward the massacre. This is something that is done unambiguously by the Scottish government, by. By the Scottish army, under orders from William and through him from people like the Master of Stair. So I don't think it's credible to see this as part of an ongoing feud between the MacDonalds and the Campbells. It's much more useful to see it within the context of a Scottish government which has a long track record of being suspicious of Highlanders, being aggressive in its policy towards Highlanders. And Glencoe becomes, if you like, the grisly zenith of that long standing trend. But it's a trend, as I see, that is that is the responsibility of the government, not of Clan Campbell.
- [18:20]
Anthony Delaney
We then get an additional 19th century layer that starts to seep down into the actual history where this become the massacre becomes somewhat kind of romanticized about, I suppose, like. And you get this in Ireland to a certain extent, not quite the same actually, but to a certain extent of the noble savage almost. And this. This idea comes. Comes a little bit more to the fore in the early 19th century onwards. And that's. I mean, it's happening in terms of Scotland anyway, and a lot of that feeds into Victoria, then later of romanticising Scotland more generally. But tell us about how that starts to materialise.
- [18:57]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
The noble savage idea, or the romanticization of the Highlands and Highlanders actually really starts in the aftermath of the last Jacobite rising in 1745 to 6 and the decades following that. We get this process of. Of reimagining the Highlands as this kind of pristine landscape populated by people who are sort of untouched by modern society, but are therefore sort of pure and noble as a result. And then Walter Scott comes along and he kind of really beefs up this narrative. I mean, it's not a narrative that has yet taken root by the 1690s. It's very much a retrospective reworking of the history of the Highlands more generally, but also the Massacre of Glencoe itself several generations later. And I suppose Glencoe feeds into that nicely because the Highlanders in this story are the victims of pretty unconscionable aggression on the part of the government. So it becomes, I suppose, if you're wanting to spin a narrative of Highlands that is victimized, that is a noble population which is unfairly repressed by these lowland barbarians, it's very easy to fit Glencoe into that narrative because it is a moment of very severe injustice and very severe violence visited upon an unsuspecting and, I think, from a modern perspective, very clearly undeserving family in the west of Gaelic Scotland. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar, across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions, to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must. Listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
- [21:27]
Maddy Pelling
The ways, the different ways really, that this history is remembered and documented and narrativised is so fascinating to me. And one of the ways that the massacre at Glencoe is remembered is through the people who still live there and still tell these histories that have been handed down through generations by the families who still occupy this land. And we're going to hear again now from our guest Lucy Dugan. Lucy grew up in Glencoe, and her family stretch back to the time of the massacre and beyond. So here she is telling us some of the stories she discovered from her. Get this great, great grandmother.
- [22:02]
Lucy Dugan
I kind of had grown up hearing stories. And then I was studying Gaelic at university. And I came across these recordings of a man called Ginger Wilson telling stories about the massacre of Glencoe. And I was listening to him tell these stories. And when he's talking about these stories, he says that he's speaking in Gaelic. But he said that he heard this story from M. Vance, Kirsten Cameron. And Kirsten Cameron, who then became Kirsten Vance, is my great, great granny. And it was her that told him these stories, these two stories about the massacre. And although I didn't necessarily hear these stories exactly as they were, as you know, with an unbroken chain through my family, I was listening to that and hearing him tell the story that he had been told by one of my ancestors. And I just. I love that. The first story that she told was about a soldier who gave a warning to a stone in the glen, hoping to be overheard. On the evening before the massacre. One of the soldiers has heard the orders. And he doesn't want to, you know, take part in this. They saw it as a betrayal of the McDonald's Trust and Hospitality as well some of the soldiers. So he's walking with one of the McDonald's from Carnage up towards Invarigan. And they pass this stone. And he stops and sits by the stone, and he speaks to the stone. He gives it a warning and hopes that he'll be overheard. And in this recording of Ginger Wilson, he recites the message that the soldier gives to the stone. The way that he had been told it. And he says, great stone there in the glen, though great is your right to be here. If you knew what is to happen tonight, you wouldn't stay here at all. And Hearing this, the MacDonald knew that he was being given a warning. And with his family, he escaped. In the night before the massacre happened. This is another one that Ginger Wilson was told by Mistress Vance. As the soldiers were moving out through the glen after the massacre. Looking for anyone who may have escaped them. People that were hiding. A group of soldiers were passing Invarigan. And they heard a noise coming from one of the buildings there. And the lieutenant in charge of that little group of soldiers said to one of these men, go on in there to that house and see who's in there and put an end to them. Whoever's in there, I want you to Go in and finish the job. So this young soldier went up into the house. And when he went in through the door, in the corner of this dark room, he saw a woman with a child clutched to her chest, held close to her chest and at her feet, a little dog lying on the ground. The soldier explained to the woman what he had been sent to do. He said to her that he'd been sent in there to kill them. And the woman said, please, please spare my child. Think of yourself. You were just a boy like this one day. And the soldier can't bring himself to do it. He can't bring himself to kill this poor woman and child. So instead he takes the sword and he sticks it into the dog. He kills the dog lying on the ground. He goes back out to the lieutenant, shows him the blood on his sword and says, that's it. The job's done. And they leave, and the woman and her child have been saved. Now, years later, this soldier's an old man and he's left the army, and he's tramping around the country, traveling around, and he finds himself in Appin, not far from Glencoe. He goes into the inn there, and he goes in, he asks for a drink, and he gets chatting to folk, and they say to him, so, were you a soldier? He says, yes, I was. And I saw all parts of the world, and I saw all sorts of things. And the man asks him, what's the worst or the saddest thing you ever saw as a soldier? And the soldier says to him, well, the worst thing I ever saw or took part in was the Massacre of Glencoe. It was terrible that I ever took anything to do with that massacre. But there's one thing I did that always comes back to my mind. As we were leaving, I was sent in to kill a woman and her child. I couldn't do it. I saved that wee boy's life. And the man sitting there at the bar with him says, well, I'll tell you, that boy was me. And for the rest of your life, you can stay here with me and I'll look after you because you saved my life that day.
- [27:06]
Maddy Pelling
Alan we hear in Lucy's stories that there's a lot of narratives that emerge in the centuries following the massacre that sort of shift the blame, interestingly, from some of the soldiers. And there's a suggestion that some of them might have warned the MacDonalds and tried to prevent some of the tragedy. Do you find that surprising, given the nature of the brutality these soldiers did in reality? Mete out on the people living at.
- [27:36]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
Glencoe, the fundamental point here is that the soldiers are largely anonymous. We don't really know the names of these people. We don't really know who they were. So while I think it's. I would be surprised if the people who had been victims of the massacre hadn't had some kind of animosity towards these soldiers, I think that would have been a level of sort of forgiveness that would have been almost superhuman. When we're talking about folk memory about Glencoe, and particularly when we're thinking about who to blame and who should be held responsible, the vast majority of the discussion, both among historians and I think among popular culture as well, has been to focus on the politicians, has been to focus on the Master of Stair, on King William, on these kind of people. And when it comes to apportioning blame, it's them who tend to come in for most criticism. What is important to note though, is that these kind of stories tend to emerge later. I think that almost a way of processing collective trauma to some extent, to making. Making sense of something which is very difficult. And one of the ways you can do that is to spin narratives around it. They're a way of trying to almost negotiate with the past and to try and figure out how you can come to terms with something which is a deeply uncomfortable moment in Scotland's history. For all sorts of reasons, and particularly in the West Highlands, when it can feed into later traumas to do with potato famine or clearance or these kind of things as well. You can spin this or you can perceive this picture of very kind of sustained traumatic experiences in Highland Scotland. And one of the ways that you cope with that is culturally, it's by producing cultural output. And I think these stories about Glencoe are part of that.
- [29:16]
Maddy Pelling
There's something so concerned with intergenerational or multi generational trauma, isn't there? And the story of the young boy having his life spared in that story we heard, and then, you know, meeting the soldier who supposedly saved him in a bar years later. There's a nice sort of poeticness, I suppose, a nice poetry to that. Of course, this being after dark, we would be remiss if we didn't look at some of the other cultural essays, echoes of a moment in history like this. And one of those echoes is supernatural adjacent, shall we say? We often find, when there are histories of real human torture and brutality, that people like to attach, stories of ghosts and ghostliness, as we're discussing here, as a way of coming to terms with some of that trauma and we're going to hear from Lucy again. Now, who's going to tell us some stories of some of the ghosts attached to the massacre.
- [30:14]
Lucy Dugan
I don't know when I heard this story first, but I have heard that on the night before the massacre, that Ben Nia was seen down by the river Co. Ben Nia is the washerwoman in Gaelic culture. She's one of the Shen, the fairy folk. The fairies in Gaelic culture are not like Tinkerbell type of fairies. They're people, but they're small and they live underground and they can give you great gifts, like the gift of music or poetry. But quite often they can be scary and troublesome characters as well. And the Beniya is one of those. And if you see the Benia, it's an omen of death. It's a sign that somebody is going to die. And the night before the massacre, one of the girls from the village was walking by the river when she saw the Ben Nea down by the river. And she has a kind of gruesome face. And she's crouched over the river and in the water, she's cleaning the clothes of someone who is going to die. Either bloody clothes or a shroud. And then, of course, the next morning, the massacre began. As well as Ben Nia, I've heard that the night before the massacre, there was another kind of otherworldly experience with another otherworldly character, the Konjak. So Konjak is keening woman, Konak is keening, mourning and wailing. And the night before the massacre, this wailing, keening sound was heard around the hills. And again, it's an omen of death, a portent of death. Alan, who I work with here at the visitor centre, he is one of our volunteer rangers and he spends a lot of time out in the hills. And actually, recently he was in Fion Glen, which is just one of the smaller glens that branches off Glencoe. And he had a very strange experience where he was on his own, completely in this glen. There's not even, you know, a maintained path into the glen. You're kind of bushwhacking your way up there. He was completely alone and he heard a woman's voice in his ear. And he turned around and there was no one to be seen. But he said he heard it as clear as day, this voice, a woman's voice in his ear. I don't think that Glencoe is haunted. I think it's a place that is dramatic and often dark and kind of gloomy at times, and can really evoke strong feelings and emotions and people. It's very dramatic, and it really lets your imagination run wild. And it is a really inspiring place. And I do think that a place can hold memory, and I think there is a kind of memory. These hills around us are, you know, 400 million years old, and I think that they hold a type of memory, and some people may tap into that and some people may not. For lots of people, Glencoe is not a place of death and misery. It's a place of life. It's full of life, and it's where people come to enjoy themselves and to relax and to find relief. But beneath that, if you choose to tap into that, there is, of course, this kind of memory of dark deeds and betrayal and betrayal, of trust and hospitality and all of that history is there, if you choose to acknowledge it or to tune into it. But I wouldn't say that Glencoe is haunted, but there is a memory of these things that have happened in the past that hangs here.
- [34:12]
Anthony Delaney
Oh, I love it so much. Like, I genuinely have such a fondness for that way of doing history. Right. I mean, it's a social and a cultural practice that keeps these history. Because I don't know if you're. As we're listening to Lucy there, it's so present tense. It's almost like it happened a generation or two ago, rather than, you know, 300 and whatever, nearly 400 years ago. I adore it. It just. It genuinely makes my heart sing to hear that kind of thing. I may not believe in the supernatural element of it, but I really appreciate the folkloric and the cultural and the significance of those things. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you, Lucy. Alan, what do you think the legacy of the. Well, how should we be referring to this moment in history? And what is its legacy, do you.
- [34:55]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
Think, in terms of its legacy? There are a couple of strands to this. First of all, the most immediate legacy is its legacy for William and William's regime in Scotland. And frankly, that's disastrous. It does. I mean, if we want to give any credit to William, he doesn't face any more Jacobite agitation until the end of his reign. No serious agitation. So I suppose from that perspective, the massacre does its job, or could be argued to have contributed towards the fact that no more Jacobite agitation happens. On the other hand, it begins a process of trashing William's reputation in Scotland. He's subject to a parliamentary inquiry in 1695 into the massacre. He's naturally cleared of any wrongdoing because Parliament is not bold enough to say that the King committed a crime. But that inquiry does declare that the massacre of Glencoe was illegal, was unconscionable, that it constituted murder, and it blames Stair, the master of Stair, for that. And when you add that into everything else that's going on in William's reign, the famine, the fact that Scotland is at war with France under William's leadership, which is very damaging to the Scottish economy, when you add that into the infamous Darien scheme at the end of the 1690s, where Scotland attempts to establish a colony on the Isthmus of Panama to disastrous effect, and Scots blame William for the failure of that scheme. Add all that together and it means that by the time William dies in 1702, he's probably the most unpopular king Scotland has ever had. He's roundly loathed north of the Border and all of these things a part of it. Glencoe is the first, I suppose, big ticket item within that mix of criticisms of William. So in the immediate term, the legacy of Glencoe is to undermine William's kingship in the long run, it's more difficult to say. I think certainly the memory of the massacre feeds into government policy towards the Highlands, Lowland attitudes towards Highlanders. And when we get to the period after 1745, when the Highlands begin to be romanticized, then it gives a bit of. It provides some very useful raw material which can go into that retrofitting of Highlanders reputation and recasting them, as we talked about earlier, as a kind of oppressed group of noble savages. So it's an event that has lots of ripples, I suppose, very much in the short to medium term. It has a big effect on William's regime. In the longer term, I think its main legacy is that cultural one that we've discussed, rather than anything more identifiable in the political or social realms, perhaps.
- [37:21]
Maddy Pelling
Alan, we will wrap up in a minute, but I just want to get your feedback on this. I suppose, thinking about those oral histories and the traditions of storytelling that. That are still rife in Glencoe itself, I wonder, as a historian who's spent a lot of time with this, what it feels for you to go into that space. Often I find myself quite sort of overwhelmingly emotional. If I go to sites that are associated with history that I'm researching, particularly histories that are difficult in some way or that need to be reassessed. And I just wonder, when you've been into Glencoa and thought about that history, does being in the landscape there have an effect on how you think about it as a historian? But Also as a human being and as a storyteller.
- [38:11]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
Yes, absolutely. I mean, historians are people. We are human beings with human emotions. And if you know that the landscape you are standing in was the site of something horrific or some difficult event from the past. And I think it's. It would be a very sort of self contained individual indeed who did not feel some kind of emotional response to that. I think the important point for me though, or a point I would make, is that I don't necessarily believe that Glencoe itself is what is producing those responses. It's something that comes from within the individual. You invest a landscape from your perspective with significance and you respond to that, which doesn't make that interaction any less valuable. But for me anyway, the locus for that is us as people.
- [38:55]
Anthony Delaney
Alan, that is just. It's been such an interesting two episodes. Thank you so much for taking us through that and thank you all for listening to this episode and the previous episode and all episodes of After Dark. Alan, thank you once again and of course thank you so much to Lucy Dugan from the National Trust for Scotland. And it's to Lucy that I kind of want to give the final word, shall we say, in this episode. One of the things that we noticed about some of the stories that Lucy was telling was the positioning of the soldiers, where it's almost like some of those stories are positioned to take the blame from the soldiers and that the soldiers were actually reticent to be involved in this massacre. And we're going to hear a similar thing now. And in this, the story of this soldier, the soldier plays the bagpipes the night before the massacre when they've heard what their orders were going to be. And they went and stood apparently in the middle of the glen, standing on a stone, playing a tune that had a coded message in it. So I'll let Lucy communicate that message to you.
- [39:58]
Lucy Dugan
Now in those days there were people who had what they called a hloois hul, the kind of musical ear. And it was this almost kind of supernatural ability to be able to hear a melody, but in it hear the words of the melody. And there was a girl in Glencoe who had the close heule and she heard that melody being played on the pipes and knew that it was a warning of danger and tried to warn everybody that danger was coming and that they should leave. Some people may have taken this warning, others obviously didn't. Some people say that the melody that he played was, which is actually a piproch song with words and it's a, you know, a warning to the women of the glen. You're better to rise early because the crow have been sorry the crow, the cattle have been taken and the men have been killed. Rise early and kind of esc.
- [41:56]
Dr. Alan Kennedy
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- [41:57]
Maddy Pelling
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Anthony Delaney
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Dr. Alan Kennedy
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