14/05/2026
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On this day in 1752, a gunshot in the Highlands sparked Scotlandās greatest unsolved murder mystery.
It was just six years after the Battle of Culloden. The Highlands had been broken.
Tartan was strictly banned. The Gaelic language was suppressed. And the British Government had sent a man named Colin Campbell of Glenure, known locally as the "Red Fox", to act as a ruthless land agent.
His job was brutal. He was ordered to evict the local Stewart families from their ancestral lands in Appin, an area sitting right next door to the still-raw memory of the Glencoe massacre. The tension was at boiling point.
On 14 May 1752, Campbell was riding through the woods of Lettermore, near Duror, when a hidden marksman fired from the trees. Two musket balls struck him. The Red Fox collapsed and died almost instantly.
Nobody saw the killer.
The government panicked. A high-ranking official had been assassinated in broad daylight, and they needed a scapegoat to make an example of. Fast.
Suspicion fell immediately on the Stewarts. The prime suspect was Alan Breck Stewart, a Jacobite soldier who vanished after the murder and fled abroad. But the man who was arrested was James Stewart of the Glens, a respected Stewart leader who many believed had not pulled the trigger at all.
There was absolutely zero evidence he pulled the trigger. In fact, he had a rock-solid alibi proving he was miles away when the shot was fired.
His trial was a scandal.
It was held in Inveraray, deep in Campbell territory. The judge was the Duke of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell. The jury contained Campbells. It wasnāt a trial. It was a legally sanctioned ex*****on.
James Stewart was found guilty and hanged. To ensure the message was received loud and clear, his body was left rotting in chains for years overlooking the Ballachulish ferry crossing. A grim, horrifying warning to anyone in the Highlands who dared to resist the state.
The Appin Murder later inspired Robert Louis Stevensonās Kidnapped, but the real mystery has never fully gone away.
To this day, the true identity of the assassin who shot the Red Fox remains one of Scotland's most closely guarded secrets. It is allegedly passed down only by word of mouth through generations of the Stewart clan, never to be written down.
Who killed the Red Fox?
A Stewart avenger?
A hidden Jacobite?
Or someone far closer to Campbell himself?
More than 270 years later, Scotland still doesnāt know āļøš“ó §ó ¢ó ³ó £ó “ó æ
