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Dunvegan Castlethe Ancestral Home of the McClure Clan
The
name Dunvegan is Scottish Gaelic for "small castle" (dun
bheagan). Dunvegan Castle has been the stronghold of the Chiefs of
MacLeod for nearly 800 years and it
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remains
their home. Built on a Rock once surrounded entirely by salt water,
it is unique in Scotland as the only house of such antiquity to have
retained its family and its roof throughout the centuries, surviving
the extremes of feast and famine, the intermittent periods of
warring with neighbouring clans, and the immense changes of social,
political and economic life through which the Western Highlands and
Islands have passed. Dunvegan castle, Scotland Dunvegan is a town on
the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It is famous for Dunvegan Castle, seat
of the chief of Clan MacLeod. Among all the historic houses of
Scotland there is none that for sheer manifold fascination overtops
Dunvegan Castle. It is at once the greatest and most renowned among
Hebridean strongholds, and the only one which has been continuously
owned and (with the exception of the eighty years after the Potato
Famine of the last century) occupied by the same family, during a
period now reaching back over a span of very nearly 8 centuries.
Architecturally it is a structure of high importance, containing
work of at least ten building periods. Its history, and that of the
famous Clan whose Chiefs have ruled from their castled Rock during
all these many generations, is rich with drama and packed with
colourful interest. Within Dunvegan's stately halls are priceless
heirlooms, some of which have descended in the hands of the Chiefs
of MacLeod since medieval times. The picturesque quality of the
building itself is matched by its glorious surroundings. "Ane
starke strengthe biggit upon ane craig", so it is described by
a writer of 1549; and so it still remains. Rising sheer from the
almost perpendicular edges of the rock, its massive grey towers and
hoary battlements stand forth against an unrivalled background of
sky and mountain and islet-spangled sea. On the landward side the
castle - no longer girt by the bare wine-dark moorland, as when Dr
Johnson visited it in 1773 - is now sheltered by extensive and
thriving plantations, through which re-echoes the ceaseless murmur
or"Rory Mor's Nurse" - that 'torrent's roaring might"
celebrated by Sir Walter Scott in the Lord of the Isles. Around
those waterfalls are being reclaimed today the gardens of the
castle, whose beauty and range of plant life have already attracted
the interest of serious gardeners from all over the world.
