In 2025 the person with whom I share my life and I travelled to Scotland and spent time on the Isle of Skye. In the main town of Skye, Portree, is the Carmina Gadelica Bookshop (see here). This excellent independent bookshop sells books about Scotland, and most particularly the Highlands. I picked up a number of new books there including The Appin Murder by James Hunter, which I have only just got around to reading.
I must admit that I thought that this book was a true crime account of an historic murder, perhaps unsolved. It turned out that the title is a little misleading. This book is about what happened to people in the Appin area of the country (the area around Loch Linnhe) after the Jacobite Uprising in the mid-eighteenth century – events which eventually led to the murder in 1752 of a local government agent and the hanging of a man who almost certainly didn’t commit the crime, although he probably knew about it before it happened. These events are also included in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped which I haven’t read – yet.
This book is, therefore, a history of the change in land tenancy and culture following the defeat of the Jacobites and the suppression of parts of the community by the victorious English. The author follows the main families in the area and does an excellent job of distinguishing between individuals, given that most of them had the same, or similar, names. The Stewart family had members that fled to France after the Uprising but those that stayed found their crofts had new landlords and that their lands could easily be seized. James Stewart was angry about this and certainly had a good deal of resentment against the Campbell family who prospered in this time, because they had supported the English and had acquired power as a result. When Colin Campbell was shot dead, on a journey to start the eviction of Stewart tenants from their homes, James was the obvious suspect and it was for this crime that he was hanged.
The narrative is excellent in showing the reader the social changes of the time and how the existing way of life was slowly eradicated by the consequences of the Uprising and the activity of the English. Whilst Colin Campbell’s death may not have been inevitable, the arrest and execution of James Stewart was. The murder plays only a small part in this book but you can see exactly why it happened.
I know sadly little about Scottish history – I have read Outlander but that hardly qualifies me as an expert (see my review of one of the books in the series here). This book was easy to read and understand and the author writes about the events with real sympathy for those caught up in them, although I would have liked there to be more maps and maybe a few illustrations. I now need to read more about the Uprising and the consequences for Scotland – and I shall also find a copy of Kidnapped to add to the to-be-read-pile.
Anne Is Reading 