Thief, outlaw and hero - Rob Roy MacGregor is one of Scotland's most famous characters.

Rob Roy MacGregor is the hero of Sir Walter Scott's novel "Rob Roy". He is very famous amongst the Scots but you cannot look him up in any historic books. However Rob Roy lived in Scotland and became famous as the Scottish Robin Hood - stealing from the rich landowners and giving the money to the poor Highlanders. Liam Neeson plays the part in the film called "Rob Roy" from 1998. 

The name Rob Roy comes from the Gaelic Raibert Ruadh or Red Robert because he had red hair.

Here is the story of Rob Roy.
At the time Rob Roy was born, the whole MacGregor Clan was in deep trouble. They had been fighting the efforts of the Campbell Clan to take over the land they had always lived on - the wild hilly district called the Trossachs, not far from the Highland Line, where the Highlands and the Lowlands meet. There was no room for the MacGregors, but they stayed defiantly on.

When Rob Roy was a boy, Scotland and England were two separate countries but were ruled by one king, who lived in London. The King's family name was Stuart, and the Stuarts had been kings of Scotland for many years before they also inherited the throne of England. When Roy was seventeen, a very unusual thing happened. King James was forced to leave the country, and two distant relations, the Dutch Prince William of Orange and his wife, Mary, took his place. In the Highlands, many of the clans remained loyal to James and the Stuart family. They were called Jacobites and the MacGregors' were among them. Rob Roy's first battle was when the Jacobites defeated the government army in the Pass of Killiecrankie in Perthshire. Rob had been brought up as a warrior, like all the clansmen, and to go into battle for his rightful king was to him a duty and a task he was well prepared for. Rob Roy was a brilliant sword-fighter as well as possessing all the other skills that made him a Highlander.

Rob Roy made his living in several ways. He was a cattle dealer - he borrowed money in order to buy the young cattle and relied on selling them for a higher price. He also "stole" cattle, but Rob Roy and the Highlanders did not see it quite like that. They believed that the cattle had always been there and did not belong to anybody. And Rob Roy's third means of earning money was also one that is against the law today. He "blackmailed" the farmers in the Lowlands to pay him money in order to stop him and for him to stop others, stealing their cattle and goods.

In 1693, Rob got married, to Mary MacGregor, a girl of his own clan whom he had known since he was a boy. Mary MacGregor was a woman of great spirit. When Rob's travels or other difficulties prevented him from visiting the Lowlands to collect his blackmail money, she went instead. She and Rob had five sons.

At this time Scotland was governed in the name of Queen Anne by four dukes. Each of them wanted to be the most powerful man in Scotland, and each plotted against the other. Rob Roy usually tried to make sure that he was on good terms with at least one of them.
One of the dukes, the Duke of Montrose, lent Rob money to buy cattle. In 1711 one of Rob's men disappeared with a very large amount of the borrowed money, and the Duke officially proclaimed Rob Roy to be a thief and announced that anyone who caught him would be well rewarded. What the Duke really wanted was to make Rob swear that one of the other dukes, the Duke of Argyll, had secretly been in touch with the Jacobite court in France, and then the matter of debt might be forgotten.
But Rob Roy was a man of honour. To ask him to swear falsely against another man for a reward was to insult him. He refused.
Montrose got furious and had Rob Roy put to the horn - publicly named as an outlaw. (The messengers blast on a horn to summon people to hear the news.) Now anyone was free to kill Rob Roy and claim a reward.

There were two things that made Rob Roy survive as an outlaw. The first one was the land itself. He knew the countryside better than anyone. He knew where to hide, where to take a short cut, where to spring an ambush on the enemy, and like all Highlanders, he could move across the hills at a great pace. The second was the people. Although there was a large reward offered for his capture, no one would help the soldiers to find him.

It was a rather desperate and lonely life to be an outlaw, and when one of the dukes offered him a meeting to discuss his future, he accepted. But Rob Roy was captured. He escaped - as he did every time he was captured - in a flamboyant style, and this added to his image and his fame grew.

The pursuit finally stopped. Rob Roy settled down with family at Inverlochlarig Beag. But the Jacobites still hoped to get the British crown, and there was another uprising in 1715. The Jacobites were defeated again and it was Rob Roy's last battle for the Stuart cause.

Daniel Defoe, who wrote "Robinson Crusoe", also wrote a book called "Highland Rouge". It was about Rob Roy but the book turned Rob from being a desperado into a famous character. The King who had wanted his head now wanted to meet him. This never happened, but Rob Roy finally agreed to be a faithful subject of King George - because he had to. But at heart he remained a Jacobit.

Rob Roy died in December 1734. You can still see his grave, covered by an ancient carved Celtic stone, in the little churchyard at Balquidder.