On a hillside near Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in May 1752 a
rider is assassinated by a gunman. The murdered man is Colin Campbell, a
government agent travelling to nearby Duror where he's evicting farm
tenants to make way for his relatives. Campbell's killer evades capture,
but Britain's rulers insist this challenge to their authority must
result in a hanging. The sacrificial victim is James Stewart, who is
organising resistance to Campbell's takeover of lands long held by his
clan, the Appin Stewarts.
James is a veteran of the Highland uprising crushed in April 1746 at
Culloden. In Duror he sees homes torched by troops using terror tactics
against rebel Highlanders. The same brutal response to dissent means
that James's corpse will for years hang from a towering gibbet and leave
a community utterly ravaged.
Introducing this new and updated edition of his account of what came to
be called the Appin Murder, historian James Hunter tells how his own
Duror upbringing introduced him to the tragic story of James Stewart.