Ardvreck Castle

Ardvreck Castle is a ruined stone tower on a rocky promontory in Loch Assynt, in the parish of Assynt in Sutherland, now within the Highland area of Scotland. The tower stands on the north side of the loch, on the neck of a long rocky peninsula, west of the hamlet of Inchnadamph. Loch Assynt lies about eight kilometres north-east of Lochinver, between the heights of Canisp, Quinag and Beinn Uidhe. It receives water from Loch Awe, Loch Maol a' Choire and Loch Leitir Easaidh, and it discharges to the sea at Loch Inver by the River Inver.

The loch runs generally west-northwest to east-southeast, and its western end bends sharply south-west at Lochassynt lodge. It is 9.65 kilometres long and about 1.5 kilometres across at its widest, with an area of about 800 hectares, a drainage basin of more than 111 square kilometres, a volume of about 250 million cubic metres, and a greatest depth of 86 metres. Its surface has been measured at 65.55 metres above the sea, and it varies with rainfall. Trout, sea-trout and salmon are fished there.

The castle has also been called Aird Bhreac. The name Assynt may come from an Old Norse word for a ridge end. Another tradition derives it from a fight between two brothers, Unt and Ass-Unt, the man of peace and the man of discord, with the winner giving his name to the parish. Inchnadamph renders the Gaelic Innis nan Damh, the meadow of the stags.

The ground around the loch was already a named country in the twelfth century, long before any tower stood on the promontory. Olvir Rosta, whose Old Norse name is Ölvir rósta and who is also called Aulver Rosta, appears in a medieval saga of the earls of Orkney, in the early twelfth century. His byname means brawl or riot. He is called the tallest of men, strong in limb, exceedingly overbearing, and a great fighter.

He was the son of Þorljót, from Rekavík, and of Steinnvör the Stout. Rekavík has been identified with Rackwick on Hoy, or less probably with Rackwick on Westray. Steinnvör's mother was Frakökk, daughter of Moddan, a wealthy farmer of the Dales, which have been placed in the Dales of Caithness. Frakökk's sister Helga was the concubine of Earl Hákon Pálsson.

For a time the earldom of Orkney was shared by Hákon's sons Haraldr and Páll. After Haraldr died, Frakökk's family fell from favour and left Orkney. She then conspired with the father of Earl Rögnvaldr to take the earldom by force and divide it. She and Ölvir went to the Suðreyjar and returned with a small fleet, which Earl Páll defeated.

The same account says Ölvir afterwards burned to death, in his own house, an Orkney chieftain who had fought against him. That man's son tracked Ölvir and Frakökk to their homestead in Sutherland. After a short fight behind the house, Ölvir's men were routed, Frakökk was burned inside the house, and Ölvir fled toward the Suðreyjar and is not heard of again. He has been associated with several places in Sutherland, some of which may bear his name, and it has been proposed that he was an ancestor of one of two clans from Lewis.

In 1962 a runestone found in the Inner Hebrides carried the name Ölvir, and the men named on it have been suggested as his relations. None of this puts a castle on Loch Assynt in his lifetime. Separately, the Murray of Culbin family held lands in Assynt in the twelfth century.

The later lords of the western seaboard belong to the same Norse and Gaelic world. Páll Bálkason, or Paal Baalkeson, was a thirteenth-century Hebridean lord and an ally of Olaf the Black, king of Mann and the Isles. A medieval chronicle of Man names him Paul filius Boke and calls him a vicecomes of Skye. That Latin title is usually turned into English as sheriff.

The title has also been read as a Norse office, such as syslumadh or armadhr, the representative of the kings of Man on Skye. An earlier sheriff, also called Páll son of Bálki and possibly an ancestor, was a close friend of Godred II. When Somerled had his son Dugald proclaimed in the Hebrides, that earlier Páll refused to swear to Dugald, fled to Man, and warned the king. The fleets met and fought into the night.

By morning Godred and Somerled made a truce and divided the isles: Somerled kept those south of Ardnamurchan, and Godred kept those to the north. The treaty has been dated to 1156 and treated as the moment the southern isles passed from the kings of Man. In the thirteenth century Reginald gave his brother Olaf the isle of Lewis, thinly peopled and mostly unfit for cultivation. Olaf asked for more land, was seized, and was sent to William of Scotland, who held him for almost seven years.

He was released when the king of Scots died. He returned to Man, went on pilgrimage, and was married to Lauon, sister of Reginald's own wife, after which the couple went to Lewis. Later Gaelic tradition remembers Páll Bálkason as a hermit, which may be a memory of the Norse title, and as a progenitor of certain families rooted in the Hebrides.

Clan MacLeod tradition stands on that sea. The traditional progenitor is Leod. A tradition that made him a son of Olaf the Black is now discredited. An older and more accepted tradition names his father Olvir and calls the kindred Sliochd Olbhur.

Tradition then gave Leod two sons: Tormod MacLeod, progenitor of the MacLeods of Harris and Dunvegan, known as Sìol Thormoid, and Torquil, progenitor of the MacLeods of Lewis, known as Sìol Torcaill. Tormod MacLeod, sometimes called Norman MacLeod, lived in the late thirteenth century. Like Leod, he appears in no contemporary record. The earliest contemporary notice of a MacLeod chief belongs to the next generation, in the reign of David II, from 1329 to 1371.

A traditional history of the clan, written down in the early nineteenth century, makes Tormod a grandson of Leod rather than a son. Another reading allows an intervening father, also named Tormod, who died before Leod and who married a daughter of an Irish chieftain named M'Crotan. The current reading takes Tormod to have been Leod's son. Tradition calls him one of the great soldiers of his time and says he fought at Bannockburn.

It gives him the sheriffship of Skye and of the Long Island, a white beard so long that he tucked it into his girdle, a death at his castle on Pabbay, and a burial beside his grandfather on Iona. It gives him three sons by his wife, Malcolm, Leod and Godfrey, says that Leod followed Bruce to Ireland and died without an heir, and that Godfrey was a monk who died abroad. Tormod was succeeded by Malcolm. That list of sons is uncertain, because the traditional history is the only place that names Leod and Godfrey in this way, and because it omits Murdoch, the son who matters for Assynt's later lords: Murdoch is taken to be the father of Torquil, founder of the Lewis line.

The surname itself is an English form of Mac Leòid, son of Leòd, and Leòd is a form of the Old Norse name Ljótr, which can mean bright or shining, or else ugly.

The Dunvegan line, not the Assynt line, supplies the next two chiefs whose lives are tied into this wider kindred. Iain Ciar MacLeod, born about 1330 and killed about 1392, is counted the fourth chief. He was the eldest son of Malcolm and is thought to have succeeded between 1360 and 1370. Tradition says Robert II gave him a charter of Trotternish and his other lands on Skye, though no such charter has been found.

Tradition calls him the most tyrannical of the chiefs, feared by his vassals and his own family, and says his wife, a daughter of an Irish O'Neil, matched him in cruelty. The same tradition says that when two of her daughters tried to leave with two MacQueen brothers from Roag, she had the brothers flogged to death and thrown into the sea, and had the daughters buried alive in the dungeon of Dunvegan. Another story sets him hunting a white stag in a Harris forest still partly held by Clan Vic Ghitthich, the children of the Wolf. An enemy blamed their chief.

Iain Ciar had that man killed by forcing the antlers of a deer into his body. At Rodel, as the hunting party prepared to sail for Dunvegan, the dead man's people attacked. An arrow struck Iain Ciar. His son William Cleireach rallied the clan.

Iain Ciar was succeeded by that son, his second and only surviving son. These are stories of the Harris and Dunvegan chiefs. They are not a record of a tower on Loch Assynt.

Iain Borb MacLeod, John the Turbulent, lived from 1392 to 1442 and is counted the sixth chief, the first to whom heraldry can be assigned. He was the son of William Cleireach. Tradition says he was ten when his father died, and that a cousin, Iain Mishealbhach, John the Unlucky, was chosen guardian. Under that guardian the MacLeods of Harris and Dunvegan are said to have reached their lowest point.

Many of the clan preferred Tormod Coil, who had killed Alastair Cannoch at the Battle of Sligachan. Tormod Coil defied the guardian and seized part of Glenelg. The MacDonalds used the disorder. They landed at Sleat, took Dunscaith and Camus, and drove the MacLeods out of Sleat.

They invaded North Uist and beat the MacLeods at Cailus. They then besieged Dunvegan, where William Cleireach's widow was living. The chief of the MacLeods of Lewis came in force, relieved the castle, and defeated the MacDonalds at Fiorlig. Torquil took the family to Lewis until Iain Borb came of age.

His first act, in that tradition, was to hang the guardian, confiscate his lands, and banish his family. He then agreed with Domhnall, Lord of the Isles, that the MacDonalds would return the lands they had taken except those on North Uist. Iain Borb swore vassalage and, on that agreement, fought under the MacDonalds at the Battle of Harlaw in 1411. Tradition says he commanded all the MacLeods, including the MacLeods of Lewis, and that they had the honour of the right of Domhnall's army.

Another account places both MacLeod clans in the main body under Domhnall, and the right wing with the MacLeans under Hector MacLean of Duart, Red Hector of the Battles. Iain Borb was wounded in the head. The wound never fully healed and kept him much of his life at his house on Pabbay. Tradition says he died when the wound reopened during a fencing or wrestling match.

There is disagreement about which son was the eldest. William Dubh was the son who succeeded in 1442.

The first MacLeod who can be tied to Assynt by a contemporary grant is Torquil MacLeod, in Gaelic Torcall, founder of Sìol Torcaill. Clan tradition once made him a son of Leod and a brother of Tormod MacLeod. Historians no longer take that seriously. He is now taken to be the son of Murdoch and a great-grandson of Leod.

The name Torquil was uncommon among the MacLeods, and it occurs in old MacNicol genealogies. Traditions link the MacNicols with Lewis and with Assynt across the Minch before the MacLeods supplanted them, including by marriage to a MacNicol heiress. The name was not used by the Harris and Dunvegan chiefs. From that, it has been proposed that Torquil's father married the heiress and gave the son the MacNicol name.

A nineteenth-century Lewis senachie remembered a story that, the year after Torquil became chief, he and the MacNicols were going in their birlins to Stornoway when MacLeod ran the MacNicol boat down in the Sound of Shiant and let the crew drown. The story has been read as the removal of rivals, after which Torquil inherited the MacNicol lands. Torquil and his uncle Malcolm are the first MacLeod chiefs in contemporary records. A royal charter of 1343, in the reign of David II, names Torkyll M'Cloyd and Malcolme, son to Tormode M'Cloyde, and grants Torquil the lands of Assynt.

Torquil is not called of Lewis in the charter, or given any other designation. In this period he is understood to have held Lewis not from the kings of Scots but from the lords of the Isles. He is said to have married Margaret, a MacNicol heiress of Assynt, and to have been succeeded by his son Roderick. The Lewis arms, a black burning mountain on gold, or in the mid-fifteenth-century blazon a rock azure in flames gules on a gold field, were probably brought in by that MacNicol marriage, perhaps from a duty of coast-watching for Norse kings.

The mottos attached to the burning beacon are "I birn quhil I se", I burn while I watch, and the Latin "Luceo non uro".

Assynt Castle, also called Eilean Assynt, stood on an island in Loch Assynt, four miles north-west of Inchnadamph. Little of it remains. It was the place granted with the lands in 1343, and it was held by the MacLeod of Assynt branch. In the early fifteenth century Roderick MacLeod of Lewis gave the lands of Assynt in vassalage to his younger son, also called Tormod, and that Tormod became the ancestor of the MacLeods of Assynt.

This Tormod of Assynt is not the thirteenth-century Tormod MacLeod of the Dunvegan line. The island castle was besieged by the Mackays of Strathnaver in 1585, and that siege was raised by Alexander, Earl of Sutherland. It was besieged again by the Mackenzies in 1646, and that siege was abandoned. It may have been used as a prison after the family moved to Ardvreck, and it appears to have been left in the sixteenth century once Ardvreck was standing.

Alasdair Crotach MacLeod, Alasdair the Humpbacked, lived from 1450 to 1547 and is counted the eighth chief of the Dunvegan MacLeods. He was the son of William Dubh and succeeded in 1480, when his father was killed at the Battle of Bloody Bay. He was the first MacLeod chief not buried on Iona, and his tomb is among the most richly carved of its time in Scotland. The nickname means humpbacked and is said to come from wounds that crippled him.

In the late fifteenth century Angus Og MacDonald, a bastard son of John MacDonald, Earl of Ross and Lord of the Isles, tried to depose his father. The branches of Clan Donald and the MacLeods of Lewis supported Angus. The MacLeods of Harris and Dunvegan, the MacLeans and the MacNeils supported John. One skirmish, in clan tradition, was at Aird Bay on Skye.

William Dubh was away. Alasdair rallied the clan against a MacDonald force led by Evan MacKail, son of the chief of Clanranald. Evan wounded him in the back with a battle axe. As he fell he pulled Evan down, killed him with a dirk, and cut off his head.

The MacDonalds were beaten, losing most of their men and ten galleys. In about the 1830s it was said that heaps of skulls and bones could still be seen there. After Bloody Bay, Angus had Trotternish invaded. Duntulm was taken by surprise and the MacLeods never recovered it.

Tradition places another fight, the Battle of Glendale, in about 1490. Later study has treated several of these battles as confused, and has placed Glendale later, perhaps after Alasdair took Dunscaith following 1513, with a MacDonald landing on the north-west coast of Skye. He was succeeded by his son William. His chiefship covers the years in which Ardvreck is sometimes said to have been founded, but he was chief of the Harris and Dunvegan kindred.

The Lewis MacLeods had been on the other side at Bloody Bay. The tower on Loch Assynt belongs to the Assynt branch of the Lewis line, not to his house at Dunvegan.

The date of Ardvreck itself is given in more than one way, and the accounts can be read as two building phases rather than a single year. One account dates the structure to about 1490, and says the MacLeods of Assynt built it in the fifteenth century in place of Assynt Castle. Another says it is customarily dated to the end of the sixteenth century, and that it was the residence of Neil MacLeod, laird of Assynt. Investigations during conservation have suggested that it began as a simple tower house at the very end of the fifteenth century or early in the sixteenth.

A date stone, now lost, of 1591 or 1597 is taken to mark an extensive remodelling and enlargement in the time of Donald Ban MacLeod. A high projecting tower and a connecting corridor were corbelled out from the main block in a manner typical of the late sixteenth century, but the workmanship is poor enough to suggest that the mason was unfamiliar with the technique. A survey on 26 November 2009 described the same sequence: a relatively modest tower house of the late fifteenth century, developed later in the sixteenth century into the castle whose remains are visible. A visit on 22 May 1962 found no date stone.

The only inscription was the date 1515, cut on modern cement facing, so that figure belongs to a repair and not to a foundation stone.

The standing ruin is a simple rectangular keep, or oblong tower, with a round staircase tower at the south-east corner. The stair tower is corbelled out on the upper floors to form square rooms, and a small stair turret to those rooms is carried on the corbelling in the re-entrant angle. The 2009 survey measured the surviving walls of the keep at about twelve metres by ten, aligned east to west. The north wall does not survive.

Much of the east and west walls had already gone by a visit on 8 September 1960. Two well preserved stone arches remain in the surviving walls, each with a very low door through to the south. Joist holes mark the levels of the floors. There appear to have been four floors.

The ground floor was divided into three compartments, all vaulted, and the first floor was vaulted as well. The upper floors were simply joisted. There were several gunports. On 22 May 1962 two iron cannons without carriages were lying in one of the ground-floor compartments.

The peninsula carried more than the tower. South and east of the keep is a level platform with traces of stone walling, read as a possible outer court or forecourt, and likely to be contemporary with the castle. A wall leaves the south-west corner and runs south-south-west. In 1962 its foundation looked narrow enough to be modern.

In 2009 it showed as a turf-covered bank with occasional stones. Across the neck of the peninsula, on the landward side and just within a modern stone dyke, the line of a rampart can be traced, with a ditch reported in 1969. A later reading found no definite ditch, and thought a modern causewayed approach might give the effect of one. The 1969 description also traced a wall to the north-north-west, running to the flat saddle between two hills, where the ground had been walled into a rectangular yard.

About ninety metres south-south-west of the keep, on the point of the peninsula, is a rectangular building. In 1962 its walls were almost completely grassed over but seemed thick. In 1969 it was divided into two compartments, one about nine feet long and the other from twenty-four to thirty feet, with a distinctly rounded south end. It has been read as a barn and kiln of uncertain date, possibly contemporary with the castle, and the protected area includes a kiln at the southern end of that building.

Less than one hundred metres north of the tower, on the banks of the loch, a grass-grown rectilinear enclosure aligned north-west to south-east, with walls up to a metre wide, was recorded on 10 December 2009 and thought to have been a walled garden. The promontory joins the mainland by a narrow strip of sand. A note of fieldwork in 2014 recorded walls and platforms belonging to the castle complex. The whole peninsula, to a greatest extent of about 220 metres from north-north-west to south-south-east by 140 metres, is protected with the tower, because the earthworks, the possible agricultural building, and the field and defensive enclosures are part of the same late medieval clan seat.

Protection of the castle dates from 3 March 1936 and was extended to the surrounding structures and the whole peninsula on 24 October 1996, with further information added on 8 November 2017. It is treated as a rare surviving example of this kind of late medieval Highland castle, and as a place of national importance.

In the sixteenth century the MacLeods of Assynt were drawn into the feuds of the north coast. They supported the Mackays of Aberach against their own chief, Huistean Du Mackay, thirteenth of Strathnaver, and in that feud they fought the Gunns at the Battle of Leckmelm in 1586. They later changed sides and stood with Huistean Du against the Earl of Caithness. The same years shook the parent house on Lewis.

Ruairi MacLeod of Lewis married a daughter of John Mackenzie of Kintail and had a son, Torquil Connanach, whom he later disowned. In 1572 Ruairi was brought before the Privy Council and forced to resign to the Crown his lands of Lewis, Assynt, Coigach and Waternish. Those lands were granted to Torquil Connanach, with Ruairi keeping a life-rent. On 2 June 1572, back on Lewis, Ruairi revoked the agreement as made under coercion.

Assynt was still being treated as a possession of the Lewis chief even while a cadet line lived on the loch. The island of Lewis itself was later lost to the Mackenzies. After that loss the title Lord MacLeod became a second title of the Mackenzie earls of Cromartie, claimed through Margaret, daughter of Torquil Connanach. The Assynt cadets remained in their own country.

Late maps show the tower already a marked place. A map of the late sixteenth century, covering Ben More Assynt and Loch Assynt, marks Ardvreck clearly, along with settlements such as Stronechrubie, and it may show an occupied island in the northern part of the loch. An atlas of 1654 shows the castle occupied, and shows townships such as Clachtoll and Inverkirkaig. A map of 1745 still shows the district in similar detail, with Ledmore now appearing.

An estate survey of 1774 maps arable and shielings. Firm dates for other buildings in the parish, before the clearances of 1812 to 1821, are scarce. Apart from Ardvreck, little can be said with certainty about standing structures of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

Donald MacLeod of Assynt is on record in the 1640s. In May 1646 George Mackenzie, second Earl of Seaforth, laid siege to the castle of Donald Ban Mor MacLeod on the isle of Assynt. A later complaint by the MacLeods said his men carried off 3,000 cows, 2,000 horses and 7,000 sheep and goats, and burned the houses of 180 families. Another account of 1646 says the Mackenzie siege of Assynt Castle was abandoned.

These may be two tellings of one attack on the island castle, or they may differ about the result. George had inherited the earldom in 1633 from his elder half-brother Colin, having before that been George Mackenzie of Kildun. In the Bishops' Wars he was appointed general of the Covenanters north of the Spey, then disbanded his army on Montrose's instructions after the Pacification of Berwick on 18 June 1639. He was suspected of being lukewarm, imprisoned for a time in 1640, and in 1641 drawn into a bond with the earls of Montrose, Wigtown, Atholl and Home.

He took arms against Montrose after the fight at Aberdeen in September 1644. After Montrose's victory at Inverlochy on 2 February 1645, Seaforth met him between Elgin and Forres, was held for several days, and was released after swearing never again to bear arms against the king. He soon joined Sir John Hurry and fought at Auldearn on 9 May 1645, where Hurry's army of Sutherlands, Mackenzies, Frasers, Roses and Brodies was beaten by Montrose's Gordons, Macdonalds, Macphersons, Mackintoshes and Irish. He later refused a commission as lieutenant north of the Spey, was excommunicated, and then joined Montrose in public at the siege of Inverness in April 1646.

After Montrose left for Norway in September 1646, compulsory loans were ordered from leading Mackenzies, sixteen of them assessed at 28,666 pounds Scots in all. Kenneth Mackenzie of Assynt was on that list for 1,000 pounds. The authorities had great difficulty collecting the money. George raised about 4,000 men in 1648 and took them south under Lanark, then brought them home to cut their corn.

After Charles I ordered Montrose to disband, George came in to Middleton and made terms, and he did public penance in sackcloth in the High Church of Edinburgh so that his excommunication would be lifted. After the king's death he went to Holland in 1649, joined Charles II, and was made principal secretary of state for Scotland, an office whose duties he never performed. News of the defeat at Worcester threw him into melancholy, and he died in August 1651 at Schiedam.

The event that fixed Ardvreck in the memory of the civil wars came four years after the 1646 raid. James Graham, first Marquess of Montrose, lived from 1612 to 21 May 1650. He was a nobleman, a poet and a soldier, later named viceroy and captain general, and he is called the Great Montrose. He first joined the Covenanters in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, then supported Charles I.

He fought in Scotland for the king from 1644 to 1646 and again in 1650. He signed the National Covenant and went with Alexander Leslie's army against opposition around Aberdeen and in the country of the Gordons. The town's own letters say those troops entered under Leslie, who remained in charge until 12 April. Montrose entered Aberdeen three times.

On the second, the Marquess of Huntly came in under a safe conduct and went on to Edinburgh. Huntly's supporters said he had been taken prisoner in breach of the pass. Other accounts judge that Huntly chose to go, and so eased his own position while sparing Montrose embarrassment. In August 1640 Montrose signed the Bond of Cumbernauld against the particular ambition of Argyll, and in the same month he was in the action at the crossing of the Tyne at Newburn.

On 27 May 1641 he was charged before the Committee of Estates with intrigues against Argyll, and on 11 June he was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. When Charles came to Scotland to assent to the abolition of episcopacy, Montrose shared in the amnesty that followed the king's return to England.

The campaign that ended at the castle began after the execution of Charles I. Defeat in the second English civil war of 1648 had put the Kirk Party, under Archibald Campbell, first Marquess of Argyll, in place of the Engagers. Argyll, shocked by the execution in January 1649, at once proclaimed Charles II, but real power required the new king to take the National Covenants of 1638 and 1643. Charles looked for a way back that would cost him fewer concessions.

On 17 January 1649 Irish Protestant royalists under James Butler, first Duke of Ormond, allied with the Catholic Confederation, and after the king was killed on 30 January the Scots Presbyterian militia in Ulster joined them. Montrose offered a matching rising in Scotland. On 20 February 1649 Charles appointed him lieutenant-governor of Scotland and captain general of his forces there, encouraged in part by risings at Inverness and in Atholl, though many advisers doubted the plan and feared it would anger the Kirk Party for nothing. In June 1649 the exiled Charles restored him to the now nominal lieutenancy.

Charles soon afterwards disavowed him, so as to take the crown on terms set by Argyll.

In March 1650 Montrose landed in Orkney to take command of a small force he had sent ahead with George Hay, third Earl of Kinnoull. The Committee of Estates had no money to pay troops, and the southern burghs were raw from taxation. By April he had four or five hundred Danish troops in Orkney and about a thousand Orcadians, mostly untrained fishermen and farmers. He had hoped for as many as ten thousand Highlanders.

The clans did not rise, the foreign contingent was too small, and the Lowlands did not move. His officers mixed old royalists and mercenaries: James Crichton, first Viscount Frendraught, Sir William Johnston, Colonel Thomas Gray, Harry Graham, John Urry or Hurry, Hay of Dalgetty, Drummond of Balloch, Ogilvie of Powrie, Menzies of Pitfodels, Douglas the brother of Lord Morton, and the English royalist Major Lisle. Urry went ahead with five hundred men and took the Ord of Caithness without trouble. Montrose followed on 12 April 1650 and kept to the hills, out of reach of cavalry.

David Leslie, first Lord Newark, with Archibald Strachan and James Holborne of Menstrie under him, had no more than three thousand foot and fourteen hundred horse, spread across the Highlands. Leslie held Brahan, Chanonry, Eilean Donan and Cromarty. John Gordon, fourteenth Earl of Sutherland, held Dunrobin, Skibo and Dornoch for the Covenanters.

Montrose landed at John o' Groats, advanced on Thurso, and took the oath of the local gentry except the Sinclairs. He left Harry Graham with two hundred men in Thurso and took Dunbeath Castle, which belonged to Sir John Sinclair, after a siege of a few days. Major Sir John Sinclair then joined him. He left a garrison at Dunbeath and met Urry at the Ord of Caithness with about eight hundred men still with him.

Dunrobin was too strong to take. He turned inland by Glen Fleet toward Lairg and Loch Shin, looking for the Munros and the Rosses and, above all, for the Mackenzies. Leslie moved north to Brechin and told Strachan, his commander in Moray, to stop the advance. Strachan drew the garrisons from Brahan and Chanonry, marched to Tain, and was reinforced.

He had two hundred and twenty veteran horse, thirty-six musketeers, and a reserve of four hundred Munro and Ross clansmen, the very men Montrose had hoped would join him. Sutherland was sent north against Harry Graham, and that move cut the road back.

The Battle of Carbisdale, also called Invercarron, was fought near the village of Culrain on Saturday 27 April 1650. Montrose had come down Strath Oykel to a place near the head of the Kyle of Sutherland, under the steep hill Craigcaoinichean, more or less level with Carbisdale, and he had camped there for several days waiting for the Mackenzies. Strachan marched west from Tain that morning and reached Wester Fearn, on the south shore of the Kyle a few miles south-east of Bonar Bridge, at about three in the afternoon. Leslie had left Brechin only that same day.

Strachan needed the royalists down on the flat, where his horse could work. He hid most of his cavalry in the long broom on the slopes of Wester Fearn, and he sent the Munros and Rosses up the River Carron to the heights above Carbisdale. His scout, Andrew Munro, son of John Munro of Lemlair, reported that Montrose had sent horse to look at him, and advised that a single troop be shown, so the enemy would think the force was small. The same narrative also names John Munro of Lemlair as Strachan's scout.

Major Lisle's reconnaissance of forty horse reported back to Montrose that only one troop opposed him. Strachan then brought up the rest. He had split his horse into about one hundred under himself, eighty under General Hacket, and forty under Captain Hutcheson, with the musketeers, Munros and Rosses under Colonel John Munro of Lemlair, Ross of Balnagowan and Quarter-Master Shaw.

Montrose ordered his infantry forward and made no special defence. Strachan attacked with his own division so that the whole strength would look like a hundred horse. Montrose's forty horse were driven back onto foot who had not been drawn up for battle. That foot was no more than twelve hundred, of whom about four hundred were Danes and Germans and the rest raw levies from Orkney.

The mercenaries kept their order and fired into the cavalry. The Orcadians broke. Strachan's reserves, musketeers included, then fell on the royalists. Menzies of Pitfodels was shot dead at Montrose's side.

The remnant tried to stand on the wooded slope of Craigcaoinichean. One account places the Munro and Ross charge at that moment. Another disputes that claim. The Orcadians were cut down, or drowned as they tried to cross the Kyle.

Montrose was wounded several times and his horse was killed under him. He got away on a horse given him by Viscount Frendraught. He lost about four hundred and fifty killed and two hundred drowned. One account reports that Urry was taken, with fifty-eight officers and nearly four hundred soldiers.

Strachan lost two men wounded and one trooper drowned. Historians have wondered whether Montrose's own scout, Robert Munro of Achness, had drawn him on with false information. One account says that Munro of Achness and his three sons escaped death and capture and do not appear in the parliamentary proceedings against Montrose's followers. Another says that Robert Munro of the Assynt, Inveran and Achness branch, with his nephews Hugh and John, was banished to the New England colonies by Oliver Cromwell for fighting as a royalist at Worcester in 1651.

From Carbisdale the fugitive made for the west. The accounts of what happened at Ardvreck do not agree, and both versions have to be kept. One account says that MacLeod of Assynt, loyal to the Covenanters, arrested the weary and fleeing Montrose and held him. Another says that he gave Montrose comfortable shelter and then betrayed him for a reward of 25,000 pounds.

A third, and more detailed, account says that Montrose came disguised as a shepherd, and that there is a strong tradition he had served with MacLeod at Inverness in 1645 and therefore expected shelter. MacLeod was away. Montrose was received by MacLeod's wife, Christian Munro, daughter of Munro of Lemlair, whose father had fought on the other side at Carbisdale. She confined Montrose in the castle cellars, together with Major Sinclair, who had been found wandering in the hills.

MacLeod was then given 25,000 pounds for handing him over. A further account says that three days after the battle, starving and lost, Montrose was heading on foot up Strath Oykel toward what he thought was friendly Reay country, stumbled on servants of Neil MacLeod of Assynt, and was led to the castle, where he was shut in a basement cellar for his protection and soon given to the covenanting militia. The Lewis kindred's own tradition says the wife of Neil MacLeod gave him shelter at Ardvreck and then betrayed him to the Marquess of Argyll. Montrose's own life says that, ignorant of MacLeod's political enmity, he entrusted himself to Neil MacLeod of Assynt at Ardvreck and was surrendered there.

The cellars still identified with that confinement are two vaulted rooms, with a passage beside them, now partly collapsed and partly filled with fallen masonry. Iron grills were later fitted over them when the ruin was consolidated. Before that work the cellars were open.

He was taken to Edinburgh. Parliament sentenced him to death on 20 May 1650. He was hanged on 21 May, with a laudatory life of him hung about his neck. He protested to the end that he was in truth a Covenanter and a loyal subject.

One account says the execution was overseen by the Edinburgh city guard under Major Weir. The body was beheaded and quartered. The quarters were shown at Aberdeen, Glasgow, Perth and Stirling, and the head was set on the prick of the highest stone of the Old Tolbooth, outside St Giles' Cathedral, where it stayed from 1650 until the beginning of 1661. Because he had been excommunicated, the torso was buried in unconsecrated ground.

In 1650 his niece, Lady Napier, sent men by night to take his heart. She put it in a steel case made from his sword, and put that in a gold filigree box which a doge of Venice had given her family. The Napier family kept the relic until it was lost in the confusion of the French Revolution. Soon after the execution, Argyll's government turned to support Charles II's attempt on the English throne, if he would impose the Solemn League and Covenant in England at least for a trial period.

After the Restoration, Montrose was rehabilitated. Charles II paid 802 pounds sterling for a lavish funeral in 1661, remembered as one of the grandest state funerals held in Scotland. His remains were taken up from the Burgh Muir and brought into Edinburgh with nobles, colours, drums, trumpets, muskets and the castle guns. In 1707 his great-grandson, James Graham, the fourth Marquess, was created the first Duke of Montrose.

Later writing moved his name from traitor or martyr toward a romantic hero. The battlefield near Culrain was afterwards inventoried and protected.

Neil MacLeod was the last MacLeod chieftain to hold lands in Assynt. In 1672 he was denounced as a rebel. A commission of fire and sword was granted against the MacLeods of Assynt, and in July 1672 the Earl of Seaforth held that commission against Neil. The earl in those years was Kenneth Mackenzie, third Earl of Seaforth, called Coinneach Mor, Great Kenneth, from his stature.

He had been born at Brahan in 1635, the eldest son of George, the second earl, and of Barbara, daughter of Arthur, Lord Forbes. His father placed him as a child with the Reverend Farquhar Macrae, minister of Kintail and constable of Eilean Donan. In 1651 he was sent to King's College, Aberdeen, under Patrick Sandylands. When Charles was recruiting at Stirling, Kenneth went home to raise the clan, because his father was still in Holland.

The men of Kintail refused to rise with a boy and said they would move only for their master. After Worcester he was a close prisoner until the Restoration. He was excepted from the pardon and grace issued for Scotland in 1654, and his estates were forfeited, with nothing allowed for his wife and children. Charles II ordered his release in 1660.

On 23 April 1662 he received the sheriffship of Ross, renewed jointly with his eldest son on 31 July 1675. He had married, about 1660, Isobel, daughter of Sir John Mackenzie of Tarbat, and they had four sons and four daughters. He died in December 1678, and his heir was Kenneth, the fourth earl. The clan account of July 1672 says that after fourteen days, and after he had been shown the commission, Neil surrendered.

The Mackenzies attacked and captured Ardvreck, sacked it, and took the lands of Assynt. The castle was never fully lived in again.

The new owners marked their hold with a house rather than by rebuilding the tower. In 1726, or in 1726 and 1727, Kenneth Mackenzie of Assynt and Frances Mackenzie built Calda House as a replacement, on the flat ground between the road and the loch, south-east of the castle. One account places a Mackenzie house here about 1660, which does not match the 1726 date, so both figures have to stand. The name comes from the Calda burn beside it, and from the two burns Calda Mor and Calda Beag.

It was the first classically inspired mansion in the north-west Highlands, and the first house there with M-shaped gables. It was double-pile, rectangular in plan, with symmetrically placed windows and doors. It was credited with fourteen bedchambers, each with a chimney or fireplace. A survey in 2009 measured the ruin at seventeen metres by thirteen and seven metres high, a three-storey house of mortared stone aligned north to south.

A subdivision runs north to south but not the full width. The west elevation, and the west end of the east elevation, have collapsed. The fallen east wall lies where it fell, while the stone of the west wall is gone. Both gables survive.

Holes for the roof joists and a number of fireplaces remain, a collapse has opened a chimney flue on the south, and some lintels are later concrete and timber.

The house did not last. The cost is said to have helped bankrupt the Mackenzies of Assynt. The lands were put up for sale in 1736. The next year, 1737, Mackenzie supporters destroyed Calda House so that it would not fall into the hands of the Earl of Sutherland.

Another telling says the house was plundered and burned in 1737, perhaps on purpose, because the family was in debt, about ten years after it was built. A further account says the Mackenzies were forfeited after the Jacobite rising and that the house was burned out by the MacRaes in 1760 and never restored. The Sutherland estate is said to have acquired Assynt in 1757, and another account says it was sold to the Earl of Sutherland in 1758. Mackenzie of Ardloch, who had acquired Ledbeg while the Mackenzies were in the ascendant, stayed on as factor.

His house at Ledbeg survives much as built: two storeys, two reception rooms off a central hall, an arch to the stair, and a kitchen the full length of the back, with fireplaces in the gables. Calda had already set a fashion. Other Mackenzie mansions on the west coast took up the same form, and Assynt's largest tacksman built a more modest classical house in the 1740s. A smaller farmhouse at Eddrachalda, east of the Calda burns, followed in the later 1770s.

During the Jacobite rising of 1745 the Mackenzie kindred was divided. The chief, Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Fortrose, did not join the rising and raised independent companies for the government, while his cousin George Mackenzie, third Earl of Cromartie, went out with the Jacobites. Among the MacLeods, the Lewis branch supported the Jacobite cause, while Hugh MacLeod of Geanies commanded an independent company of the MacLeods of Assynt on the government side. By then Ardvreck was already a sacked tower, and Calda was already a burned house.

In 1795 a thunderstorm badly damaged what remained of the castle.

The MacLeods of Assynt kept a burial place at Inchnadamph after they had lost the tower. Local lore gives the old parish church an origin under Angus MacLeod, laird of Assynt from 1436 to 1443. The first official notice is in 1455. Only their burial vault survives from that older building, in the graveyard south-east of the present church.

Pieces of a Celtic cross, dated from the eighth to the eleventh century, have been found there. The present church was built from 1741 to 1743 and was renovated in 1900 by William C. Joass. It is a five-bay rectangle, about fifteen metres by six, aligned east to west, with a spire on a square base and a cross finial, a graded slate roof, and pebble-dashed whitewashed rubble walls.

The church and graveyard occupy about thirty-two metres by twenty-six. The interior has an octagonal pulpit and pine pews from the 1900 refitting. It is no longer used for worship. The churchyard and the MacLeod vault, as distinct from the eighteenth-century building, are themselves a protected monument.

By the 1990s the redundant kirk, Ardvreck and Calda were all in danger of partial collapse. Conservation of the three structures was finished by 2006, and the churchyard walls and the MacLeod vault were conserved after that.

The Dunvegan chiefship continued on a different line from the Assynt lairds. John Norman MacLeod, born on 3 August 1788 and dead on 25 March 1835, was the twenty-fourth chief of Clan MacLeod. He was born in India, the son of Major-General Norman MacLeod of MacLeod, the twenty-third chief. He married Anne Stephenson, sister of the banker Rowland Stephenson, and they had nine children.

He sat in parliament for Sudbury from a by-election in 1828 until 1830. He was buried at Old Kilmuir cemetery at Dunvegan, and his son Norman succeeded as the twenty-fifth chief. He had no part in the lordship of Assynt, which had passed from the MacLeods in 1672 and from the Mackenzies to Sutherland in the middle of the eighteenth century. He belongs here because the Dunvegan line is the other half of the kindred that began with Tormod MacLeod, and because that line was still producing chiefs in the century after Ardvreck had become a ruin.

The ruin was measured again, and its approaches noted, in the parish survey carried out from 23 November to 11 December 2009. Fifteen days of walking covered more than two hundred and twenty sites, from the Neolithic to the modern, with four archaeologists and local volunteers. Of those sites, seventy were strongly recommended for further survey and possible trial excavation, sixty-three had further work as an option, thirty-nine would not benefit, and forty-eight showed no remains or had been false reports. Ardvreck was visited on 26 November 2009 and described as mostly ruinous, reached by a short and easy walk on a gravel path from a car park.

The same survey is the source of the twelve-by-ten-metre measurement, the two arches, the joist holes, and the reading of a late fifteenth-century tower enlarged in the sixteenth century. The 2014 note of walls and platforms added a further field record of the complex. Nearby, the chambered cairn at Ardvreck is the one Sutherland cairn set apart from the Orkney-Cromarty passage graves of the region and classed instead with the Clyde cairns. That monument is older than the tower and is not part of the castle's masonry.

The Bone Caves of Inchnadamph, in the same limestone country, have produced Eurasian lynx, brown bear, Arctic fox, reindeer dated to about 47,000 BCE, the only polar-bear evidence yet found in Scotland, and human skeletons of the third millennium BCE. A bear skeleton thought to be 11,000 years old or more was taken from the caves in 2008. Cavers had found the bones in 1995, deep in Uamh an Claonaite, the longest cave in Scotland, five miles south of Inchnadamph. The animal is presumed to have died while hibernating, and the body to have been washed farther into the system.

Stories told at the loch should not be confused with this record. One story says a daughter of a MacLeod chief, promised to the devil, threw herself from a window of the tower, and that her weeping ghost remains, together with the ghost of a tall man in grey. Another names the daughter Eimhir and says she did not die on the rocks but entered the caverns of the loch and became the mermaid of Assynt, or in another telling a selkie. High water is called her tears.

A further telling has Clootie, angry at the broken promise, call down rocks from the sky, and it sets that tale beside the geological finding that north-west Scotland was struck by an object from space about 1.2 billion years ago. Geologists working in Aberdeen described a massive impact that would have melted rock and thrown up a cloud of vapour, scattering material over a wide area around Ullapool, with the crater then buried by sandstone. Another version of the tale attaches the same anger to the Moine Thrust. These are explanations offered in legend for the shape of the ground.

They are not evidence for the date of the tower, the captivity of 1650, or the surrender of 1672.

Among later writers who have lived in the Highlands is John Keay, born at Barnstaple on 18 September 1941 to parents of Scottish origin, a master mariner and a housewife. He read modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, has lived in Edinburgh and in Argyll, and in 2019 received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Highlands and Islands. His life belongs to the modern Highlands, and it is not a substitute for the charter of 1343, the masonry, or the campaign of 1650.

What the place was used for follows from the same sequence. It was the seat of the MacLeods of Assynt, a cadet house of the Lewis MacLeods, holding a peninsula in a loch that their ancestors had been granted in 1343 and that a younger son had received in vassalage in the early fifteenth century. It replaced an island castle. It was enlarged, probably in 1591 or 1597, under Donald Ban MacLeod, with gunports and a corbelled stair.

It was the house in which, in 1650, a defeated royalist captain-general was confined and given up, on accounts that differ about whether the act was an arrest, a protection that turned into a sale, or a betrayal by the laird's wife while he was away. It was sacked in 1672 when the last MacLeod laird of Assynt surrendered to a commission of fire and sword, and it was replaced by Calda House, which itself stood for about a decade before it was burned as the estate passed toward the Earls of Sutherland. The political stake in 1650 was whether Charles II could be brought back by a Highland rising that had not accepted the Covenants. The stake in 1672 was whether the last MacLeod possession on the mainland of this kindred could survive the Mackenzies who had already taken Lewis.

Neither gamble was won by the men inside the tower. What remains is the vaulted basement, the south-east stair, the earthworks across the neck, the cannons lying in a cellar in 1962, and the burned shell of the house that succeeded it.