Highland ghosts

As I prepare for my Highlands walk in Scotland, now only 24 days away, I'm repeatedly impressed by the bleakness, the barrenness, the desolation -- the atmosphere of gloom -- of some of the areas through which I'll be hiking. Austerely beautiful, yes, but also cold and unforgiving.

A striking example is Glen Coe. That name sounds deceptively gentle and pretty to our Yankee ears, perhaps because of its association with a number of pleasant American towns named "Glencoe" after the Scottish original. But Glen Coe is a narrow glacial valley, and, until quite recently, isolated and remote . The river Coe runs through the glen. The meaning of its name is lost to history, "Coe" (or "Comhan" in Gaelic) most likely arising out of some unknown, pre-Gaelic language.

The hiker comes down into the glen off of Rannoch Moor to the east, itself a wild and dampish spot, drenched by over 100 inches of rain a year. The names of surrounding mountains and other physical features sound as though they were drawn directly from Tolkien's Middle Earth: Meall a'Bhuiridh, Stob Dearg, Aonach Mor, River Etive. I'll spend my night in the glen at the isolated Kingshouse, an eighteenth century hostelry which played its part in the salt smuggling trade of days long past.

But Glen Coe is best known to history for the infamous Glen Coe Massacre of Clan MacDonald in 1692.

The horror of that massacre began with political events at the highest level. When William of Orange was summoned to become king of England, he succeeded the deposed James II, who had also been James VII of Scotland. The Jacobite uprisings followed, anti-English rebellions by Scots -- especially Highlanders -- whose loyalties remained with James. Once the uprisings were put down, William gave each Highlander clan a January 1st deadline by which it could swear allegiance to his rule and be pardoned for its part in the uprising.

The MacDonald chief was a few days late in swearing his oath; this tardiness resulted from several causes, including adverse weather and the unavailability during the holidays of a proper English authority to hear the oath. It was assumed that the chief had fulfilled the spirit of the requirement and that the clan would receive its pardon. But the cabinet member responsible for Scottish affairs, a Scot himself who felt that the Highlander clans posed an obstacle to good government, had other ideas.

In February, 120 soldiers were sent to Glen Coe to be billeted with the local clansmen, supposedly while they went about collecting a routine tax. They were greeted as guests by the MacDonalds. Soldiers and clansmen fraternized in a friendly fashion for about two weeks, until the order was received by messenger from Fort William: Put to the sword every member of the clan under 70 years of age. The English commanding officer sat up playing cards with his hosts the night before the massacre, wished them all a good night upon retiring, and accepted an invitation to dinner the following day.

At 5 a.m., the English forces arose silently from their beds and killed the Highlanders in their sleep or while they attempted escape. Thirty-eight men were thus killed. The soldiers then burned every house and drove off all the livestock, leaving another 40 women and children to die of starvation and exposure. Some MacDonalds escaped with their lives into the hills only because English reinforcements, with orders to kill all fleeing members of the clan, were late in arriving on the scene.

The bleakness of Glen Coe therefore lies not entirely in its solitude and in its stark physical features. Although the area is now accessed by a modern road, and serves as a popular hiking and climbing center in summer and as a ski area in winter, ancient wrongs hang like a mist over the narrow glen, wrongs that remain forever unrequited.

I'll be disappointed if I don't feel surrounded by the restless ghosts of the men, women and wee bairns of Clan MacDonald as I lie fitfully abed in Glen Coe, Scotland.