Clan MacDougall - Dunstaffnage Castle - Photo Print

Photographer Aly Wight photographed Dunstaffnage from the castle's outer grounds, looking up through bare winter trees at the curtain walls against a brooding sky. A dry stone wall crosses the foreground, giving a sense of the scale these walls once commanded.

The MacDougalls were lords of Argyll in medieval Scotland, descended from Dougall, son of Somerled, the Norse-Gaelic warlord who controlled the western seaboard in the twelfth century. They built Dunstaffnage on a site that had served Scotland's earliest Gaelic kings since the seventh century, and tradition holds the Stone of Destiny was once kept here. In 1309, after defeat at the Pass of Brander, Robert the Bruce took the castle and gave the keepership to the Campbells.

If your name is MacDougall, your ancestors built this fortress on ground that had been royal for six centuries before them.