Anyone from Argyll or visiting and traveling north through Glencoe on the A82 is likely to have seen Big Boy. He was a stag who had become so used to human company – and the food it tended to hand over – that he was constantly strolling into the big layby viewpoint (with the mobile snack bar) on the steep rise up to Rannoch Moor.

The owner of the snack bar, Earle MacDonald (the right name for Glencoe)  would cut up pieces of vegetables and fruit for him and he would come and eat them out of an apron kept for the purpose.

Then a driver found him lying at the roadside, bleeding from several wounds to his head, weak and in obvious pain. The man contacted the estate gamekeeper who, when he saw the state Big Boy was in, had no option but the humane one – to put him down.

An examination of the stag’s body found five air-gun pellets embedded in his jaw and eye.

The heartbreaking thing is that, unafraid of people and seeing them as a friendly source of food, Big Boy would have come up to his torturers and just stood there while they peppered him.

It has seen a gentle, opportunist and unsuspecting animal dead in pain – and with him the delight he gave to travellers, leaving them with them an indelible memory of a special place.

The Police have put posters up but naturally have no clues to the identity of those who committed this mindless act. It is thought that they were revellers returning from Hogmanay celebrations at the Black Mount in Glencoe. What sort of person takes an air gun along to an event like that? All that can be done is to hope that, as is often the case, what goes around comes around.