The highlands, Glen Coe, wild and cold and sparse. A land of simplicity where the enemy is the wind and the rain and the English.
That’s not fair, actually. The English just used the traditional divisions between the clans, between the Highlanders and the Low. They used the tradition of hospitality that is found in all nomadic, semi-nomadic cultures where the greatest enemy is the world they live in.
When a person seeks shelter under your roof, be it stone or bedouin tent, you are duty bound to take that person in, without question, to feed them and keep them warm until the guest takes the initiative to move on.
It is the pay it forward tradition not in a warm fuzzy, a hollywood soft focus happy ending movie way. It is pay it forward in a someday you will be caught out in the storm and even the roof of your sworn enemy is shelter. There are no enemies under a roof.
Until Good King William–yes, that King William, the Orange, who is commemorated by Orange Lodges everywhere as the scourge of the papists and devisor of the ‘final solution’ to the Irish Problem–put a Campbell in charge of a regiment of soldiers and forced him to take them, as his own brothers, into the lands claimed by clan McDonald.
The Campbells did have a just grudge against the MacDonalds as did the MacDonald against Campbell. The lowland and highland clans had been fighting each other long before the Romans or the English stuck their meddling noses into the mix.
But even with that history behind them, the rule of hospitatility, the law of trust, overrides all. Even the orders of a military officer, the rule of law, the rules of war are not above the law of trust.
And that is what the Campbells broke. That is the story of Glen Coe that haunts these cold, misty mountains.
There is much more to the story than that but to this day whenever the name Campbell is mentioned, a Macdonald will bless the ground with spit.
