Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 39 on 23/06/2008.

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The last bandit

Ian R.Mitchell looks at the tale of Ewan Macphee, Scotland's last true outlaw

Scotland’s most famous outlaw is undoubtedly Rob Roy MacGregor.

Rob has inspired countless books since Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy and, a decade ago, was the subject of a successful Hollywood film. But who knows that a century after Rob Roy’s death in the 1730s, there existed an equally colourful bandit in the Scottish Highlands, Ewan MacPhee of Glenquoich? Surprisingly, we know less about MacPhee than we do about Rob Roy’s well documented life Even the precise date of Ewan MacPhee’s birth is not known, though it took place in Glenquoich at a place called Corrie Bhuidhe, in the 1780s. His father, like many of the broken MacPhee clan, was a small time outlaw who was reputedly ‘out’ with the Jacobites in the 1745 Uprising.

Ewan was born on the ancestral lands of the MacDonnells of Glengarry. Previously tainted with Jacobitism themselves, the MacDonnells were anxious to prove their loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty and forcibly enrolled many of their tenants in the militias raised to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. One of these so pressed, around the year 1808, was Ewan.

Little is known of his military service, though some of MacDonnell’s recruits saw service overseas. MacPhee deserted his regiment, a capital offence in wartime, after reputedly striking – some versions say killing – an officer, another capital offence.

Meanwhile, his family had moved to a place called Fedden, on the remote border of the MacDonnell lands, and Ewan lived there, and at various other locations, u.....

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By Ian R Mitchell

Section : Scotland Characters

Page number : 42