Yesterday, my husband and I attended the local Scottish Festival and Highland Games. This was a third – twice, out in California, we attended the big one at Pleasanton. We both have Clan Campbell shirts – everyone in California had a clan shirt (in comparison, we were the only ones who had them here, and had several people ask where we’d gotten them).
While on the bus, I had a woman sit in front of me, take one look at my shirt, and say “Oh no, I’ve got my back to a Campbell!”
We laughed along like we had any sort of idea what they were talking about.
This would be repeated several times throughout the day. I, at one point, asked my husband why one shouldn’t turn his back on a Campbell, but he either didn’t hear me or didn’t know, so that was not helpful. I’d never heard anything along these lines at the other Scottish Festivals we’d attended.
We stopped by the Clan Campbell tent and I meant to ask, but they distracted us with Scotch and awesome music and dancing. (Also, apparently the local clans have some sort of traditional where each clan has a stuffed sheep, and the other clans try to steal each other’s sheep, and the Buchanans kept trying to make off with the Campbell one while we were there.)
I spent all night wondering just what the Campbells had done to warrant such a reputation.
Today, I turned to Google in an attempt for clarity. “Never turn your back on a Campbell” yielded exactly four results (and Google suggested that perhaps I meant “never turn your back on a cactus” which worries me slightly), but I have determined that after the Jacobite conflict, apparently the government ordered the slaughter of the Macdonalds at Glencoe (as an example to those that had supported the wrong side). Some of the soldiers that executed the attack were Campbells (something like six out of 400), and apparently it got twisted so that people marked it up as another notch in the Campbell-Macdonald feud.
That kind of sucks, honestly. The massacre at Glencoe was horrendous, but it’s a shame that it’s blamed on one clan.
Oh well. What’s a girl to do 450 years after the fact?