Glendaruel highlanders

The Glendaruel Highlanders is a 6/8 march with a well-documented history. It was composed around 1860 by Alexander Fettes, Pipe Major of the City of Aberdeen Volunteers. The piece was written in tribute to the family of John MacDougall-Gillies, a champion piper from Glendaruel in Argyll, who won the gold medals at Oban and Inverness in 1884 and 1885.

When the Argyllshire Volunteers came under the command of Colonel Campbell of Glendaruel, they adopted the march as their March Past, a tradition that was subsequently passed on to the 8th Battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. The modern four-part version is supplemented by two additional parts written by D. R. MacLennan, first published in 1936 in the Seaforth Highlanders collection.

The melody reaches well beyond the bagpipe repertoire alone: the glen of Glendaruel has inspired several other pieces — The Sweet Maid of Glendaruel, The Dream Valley of Glendaruel — and the tune of the Glendaruel Highlanders was borrowed for the famous Scottish comic song Campbeltown Loch, popularised by Andy Stewart.