Robert Allan

Robert Allan was shot after going out to deal with people that had been causing a disturbance outside his farm after he had gone to bed.

He was found dead on an old pit road leading from the farm to Watstown.

The farm, Drumshangie Farm, was halfway between Greengairs and Airdrie.

The night Robert Allan was shot was the first night that they had not had servants at the farm. He was at the farm with his wife with whom he had only been married for about a year and had a three week old child.

Just after they went to bed some people came to the window and created a disturbance. Robert Allan rose from his bed and took his ordinary double barrelled fowling piece and opened the door and fired his gun into the air to scare them away. However, that only seemed to make them even more outrageous.

He then put on his trousers and went outside and fired another shot and was never seen alive again. He was later found dead lying across a track partly on his right side with one arm underneath him. His gun was a few feet away pointing away from him and resting on a slight embankment that skirted the side of the roadway. Both barrels of the gun had been discharged.

It was thought that he had followed the men down the old pit roadway to where the trolley had been drawn, about 100 yards from the farm. His wife and another woman in the farm heard nothing after he had left.

When he was found he had a gunshot wound to the centre of his abdomen near the stomach and it was said that the injury indicated strong reason to suspect foul play.

However, it was reported further mystery clouded the incident with it being suggested that he might have in fact stumbled in the darkness and fallen over the loaded gun and shot himself.

However, the suggestion that he had shot himself was said to have been hardly consistent with the fact that the locks of the gun were both found to be empty of the cartridge cases and that his body was found lying face downwards and his gun a yard away.

It was also suggested that Robert Allan might have encountered an assailant with whom he had struggled, being shot in the process and that his body and gun were moved afterwards from their original positions.