The Highland Line: revisiting the murder that inspired R L Stevenson's Kidnapped

This rather daft piece of criminal enterprise may have triggered memories of a far bigger crime in that area, which involved two murders. The first was political, in the broadest sense. The second was almost certainly judicial murder.

These are soon to be examined by Scotland's national academy of science and letters, the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The break in was at St Brides Episcopal Church in Onich on the north side of the bridge.

The fact other valuable items including a silver box were still there led Rev Adrian Fallows to conclude the thieves were after the Appin Chalice.

The Appin Chalice was used by an Episcopalian minister to give the Appin Regiment, mostly Stewarts, just before the Battle of Culloden in April 1746. It was supposed to have been retrieved from the battlefield and taken back to Appin and now normally resides in St John's Episcopal Church at Ballachulish on the south side of the bridge.

One of those likely to have taken communion that day was one of the officers in the regiment James (Stewart) of the Glen - Seumas a' Ghlinne -  who was convicted and hanged for the Appin Murder.

The murder convulsed the 18th British establishment because the dead man was Colin Campbell of Glenure, the Hanoverian government's factor who was on his way to evict former tenants of  exiled Stewart chieftains. James Stewart was a Jacobite who had fought at Culloden.  The murder was central to the plot for one of Scotland's most celebrated novels, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (1886) in which Colin Campbell was called the Red Fox for the first time.

As the millions who have read the book know, after the murder, a man with a gun was seen running away, up the hill. When David Balfour, follows him, he eventually comes across his one-time travelling companion, Ailean Breac armed only with a fishing rod.

Historian James Hunter's “Culloden and the Last Clansmen” argues a murder conspiracy was indeed hatched by the Stewarts of Appin including the real life Ailean Breac, who would have had to leave the country anyway as a known deserter from the British army before the rising. So things were arranged that everything would  point to his guilt. But the authorities were to pursue James Stewart, his foster father instead.

When Hunter's book was published in 2001, Anda Penman, 89, a descendant of the Stewarts of Appin who was in an Inverness nursing home, identified Donald, the son of Stewart of Ballachulish as the real killer. She said she had kept the secret that had been passed on by word of mouth through her family for more than two centuries.

James Stewart was hanged on a hill just beside the southern end of the Ballachulish Bridge. His corpse was left on the specially reinforced 30ft gibbet for more than four years, his bones dropping off one by one and collected by a kinsman so that he could finally be laid to rest. Yet it was clear that he could not have fired the gun which killed Campbell and there was little or no evidence that he was involved with his clansmen in the undoubted conspiracy to murder Campbell.

His trial was a farce in a kangaroo court. Eleven out of 15 jurors were Campbells and Hanoverian; the senior of the three judges was the Duke of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell; and the court sat without break from five on a Friday morning until seven on the Sunday morning.

But more than 250 years later a Campbell came forward to try to clear Stewart’s name, John Campbell, a former lorry driver from Motherwell.

He had first become interested in the story in 1982 when he visited the West Highland Museum in Fort William. “I saw there the musket used  which was found in a hollow tree in the woods of Lettermore in Appin. That's what started it for me. I then got hold of the book on the Appin murder by Lt General Sir William MacArthur who uncovered so much about the truth of the murder and the trial.”

A sense of injustice remained with him, despite his own clan allegiance.  He explained: “My grandfather emigrated from Lithuania 100 years ago and settled in Boswell. He adopted the name Campbell. It is the only thing I have against him, that he didn't take a good Jacobite name.”

He instructed his lawyer John Macaulay to take up the case and he went first to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). But in December 2008 the commission announced it would not review the case as it would not be in the interests of justice, largely because more than 250 years had elapsed.

But he didn’t give up and subsequently went to the Scottish Justice Department. But within days of all his paperwork being received in Edinburgh, he received it back with an accompanying letter from an official.

It said: "Please find attached papers that were sent to Scottish Government and which we are now returning. This should be dealt with by the Scottish Criminal Case Review Body (sic)..."

Mr Macaulay wrote back: "I am afraid you have not helped one little bit and I am now returning the papers for the matter to be considered properly."

A Scottish Government spokesman told the Herald at the time: "When the original correspondence was received, the fact the case had already been to the SCCRC was overlooked. But it is now back with solicitors who will consider the case and respond in due course."

But it seemed to die a death which was unfortunate.

However the Royal Society of Edinburgh has now announced that it is going to look at the whole affair over two days in September at an event in Fort William.

The prestigious body was founded just 30 years after James Stewart was hanged and as part of its deliberations will stage a mock retrial.  It is to be congratulated for seeing this as something worthy of  investigation more than a quarter of a millennium later.

No matter the time, the quesiton remains - how could it be that in the year after Adam Smith was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow University, the mother of parliaments and British Government was content with judicial murder up the road in Argyll?