A Multiplicity of Charlies: the winding path connecting Airlie to Loch Lomond

Image: Airlie Castle By Simon Cotterill – https://www.flickr.com/photos/137828720@N06/51368183908/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=179738954

If you have patience to read to the end of this post, it may or may not be Soundyngs’ only mention of the World Cup this summer.

Ask anyone under the age of 30 these days where they might hear ‘Loch Lomond’ being sung, and they will tell you that this song is now firmly part of the ritual end of evening singing for 21^st birthday parties, weddings, and any other celebration, in the space that older folk might have sung ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (although why not have both together, as many do).

This is a strange fate, for a song whose Jacobite words imagine the return of two friends to Scotland, one overland, the other underground as a ghost, taking high and low roads respectively. Fair enough, it’s about the kind of human connection that lasts unto and beyond the grave; it’s just a wee bit dark if you think about the words….

But this is a song with a complicated social history, which has survived and been transformed by many historical twists and turns. Most people today assume that it is simply ‘Jacobite’, but that’s only part of the narrative.

The tune is older than the words, associated with a lament called ‘The Bonnie Hoose O Airlie’.  This recounts events that took place a century before Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army marched south then north again, and centres around Scottish divided loyalties in the civil wars fought under another Charlies the first, in the 1640s.

I realised this as I listened to Jeannie Robertson’s singing of ‘The Bonnie Hoose O Airlie’ on a social media post by Tobar An Dualchais, the 21^st century technology of a new kind of orality.

As the site’s track notes explain, “The Bonnie Hoose O Airlie” relates the history of the Covenanters’ attack on the Airlie Castle, a Royalist stronghold, in 1640.  The castle was defended by the defiant chatelaine Lady Margaret Ogilvie, as her husband James Ogilvy, first Earl of Airlie is away fighting for King Charles I. When he returns, according to the song, he finds his castle burned down (see notes on both Tobar an Dualchais and Historic Environment Scotland). These are not the words sung to this tune at modern celebrations: but the tune mostly is.

Whether the tune is even older, no one knows; but it would be strange if it hadn’t had some kind of priming from the repertoire of laments known to singers at the time.

The Ogilvies continued to support the Stuart dynasty. During the 1715 Jacobite rising, they came out in support of James Edward Stuart, and in 1745, again for Bonnie Prince Charlie. After the collapse of the cause, David, Lord Ogilvy left Scotland for France, where he lived with other Jacobite exiles for many years.  The castle ruins that remain today are a creative reuse of the earlier ruins as the outer face for a late 18^th century building, built on his return home in 1792. Behind the daunting curtain wall lie much more comfortable domestic apartments (see Historic Environment Scotland).  That’s one way to take the ‘high road’ home.

So how did the tune become attached to new words to become everyone’s favourite birthday ballad, ‘Loch Lomond’? Airlie Castle is near to Kirriemuir in Angus; this was a story from East Coast Scotland. Loch Lomond is on the west side of the country.  So begins the migration of the tune to reflect a changed, 18^th century, Jacobite landscape of political loyalties.

Reasonably enough, well known tunes with particular political associations – in this case, loyalty to the Stuarts – may be given new words as historical events unfold; no single author can be found for the words, which may be a combination of many different oral versions. The context story, however, has some common elements.

In 1745, just over a century after the siege of Airlie Castle, Bonnie Prince Charlie marched his army down as far south as Derby in 1745, before having to retreat back north. Many of those captured by the Hanoverian General, the Duke of Cumberland. were executed at Carlisle. One traditional interpretation of Loch Lomond is that it represents the words of a doomed soldier on the scaffold (see Ford, p.276).  According to Murray Pittock, the words are “a Jacobite adaption of an eighteenth century erotic song, with the lover dying for his king, and taking only the ‘low road’ of death back to Scotland. A trope in Jacobite song is to translate romantic love (whether between the besieged Lady Ogilvie and her husband, or a later Jacobite soldier and his lover), into a kind of sublimated political love expressing the relationship between a loyal subject and Charles as the King in Exile (Pittock, p.136-7).

Mingled alongside and giving an additional mysterious energy to the fictionalised commemoration of actual historical events is the Celtic belief that the souls of the dead take a fairy pathway back home. Across many different Celtic cultures, pre-Christian stories associated fairies with an underground world inhabited by spirits and ghosts.  Fairies were associated with giving safe passage on those carrying bodies along ‘coffin roads’, often linking remote settlements to community burial grounds (see Devereaux, p.48-9). Wherever ‘Loch Lomond’ began, it probably had a connection with the Gaelic speaking parts of Scotland most loyal to the Jacobites, who were aware of the links between underground fairy roads and the dead. The Covenanters of the 17th century would probably not have approved, but Jacobites were more connected with episcopal (and Stuart) traditions, which were a little more open to a wider range of pre-modern beliefs (see Holder).

Some of the words associated with ‘Loch Lomond’ today evolved alongside the broadside ballad sheets of popular song in the 19^th century. One story, related by Robert Ford in 1900, recounts that Alicia Ann, Lady John Scott (antiquarian, and author of the tune “Annie Laurie”) heard the words sung on the streets of Edinburgh (Ford, p,277). There seem to be no single author: the words emerged gradually and became gradually fixed in printed anthologies, from fragments surviving from different times, attached to the line of the Stuart cause and the timeless notion that great love survives even death.

Many modern recordings exist of ‘Loch Lomond’ in styles including both classical and folk, but it is probably the Runrig mass participation version which has become iconic of a certain kind of generalised social bonhomie.  The band first released their version of the song in 1979 as a single as well as on their album The Highland Connection, to moderate chart success.  After 1979, Runrig went on to become a rock star phenomenon, particularly famous for vibrant live stage performances.  From there, ‘Loch Lomond’ found its way onto Scottish football terraces, and recognising the synergy, Runrig re-recorded it in 2007 during a Scotland-Ukraine football game in Glasgow’s Hampden stadium, as part of the annual BBC Children in Need charity campaign. This version solidified the song as a crowd participation favourite, with a backing chorus of some 50,000 Scottish football supporters (aka ‘The Tartan Army’) singing at the top of their collective lungs. The crowd dynamics of big-arena pop concerts and sports stadia create an entirely different meaning to the original solo lament sung to a dead loved one.

Hence, today, it is sung, noisily and energetically, as a mark of exuberant camaraderie, during any broadly celebratory event.

Pathways branch unpredictably, and because of football, it is also apparently sung by the supporters of FC Kõln (Rae and Sharp, who cite the Runrig version as the source). Remembering the song was about a historic defeat, a wee reach out for Scottish football fans this summer.

Further Reading and Listening

• Anon, ‘Scotland fans record charity song’, on BBC News website 14^th October 2007, accessed 23/6/26
• ‘Airlie Castle’ on Historic Environment Scotland portal , accessed 23/6/26
• ‘The Bonnie Hoose O Airlie’, sung by Jeannie Robertson, recorded by Hamish Henderson, track ID 49656 on Tobar an Dualchais / Kist O Ridches
• Paul Devereaux, Spirit Roads: An Exploration of Otherworldly Routes (London: Collins and Brown, 2007)
• Robert Ford, Song Histories (Glasgow and Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1900)
• Geoff Holder, The Jacobites and the Supernatural (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2009)
• Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
• Derek Rae and Gillian Sharp, ‘Why do these German football fans sing the Loch Lomond tune?’ video on BBC News website 19 June 2024, accessed 23/6/26