Hi Sandy - you're not adding to the confusion, you're just adding detail that I should really have included at least some of in my post - thanks.

In point 5) of my sequence above I should also have said that when the Campbells nicked the four verses and chorus that they liked from the 8-verse version, and made it into their own song, they must at that point have added the references to Argyll, who, as you say, was the head of their clan, and their equivalent in status to Lord Ranald McDonald.

One thing that does add confusion is that it strikes me as unlikely, now I think about it, that the one-verse poem attributed to Burns, which now forms the chorus of the song, could really have been written by him - it's not up to his usual standards, especially as a complete poem. But he was a collector as well as a writer of folk songs, so maybe he just collected what was then a one-verse ditty, published it, it got wrongly attributed to him, with the remainder of the sequence of events still being as I postulated above?

Do you agree that the sequence of events I described seems likely?