Clan MacDougall - Gylen Castle - Photo Print

Photographer Aly Wight captured this from high on Kerrera’s southern headland, looking along the cliff edge to the ruined tower house at its tip. The sea opens on three sides, with rocky islets on the horizon and a shingle beach far below.

Duncan MacDougall built Gylen as a tower house in 1582, at the end of an island where the clan controlled the sea lanes into Oban. Inside, the clan kept the Brooch of Lorn, their most prized possession, said to have come from Robert the Bruce’s abandoned cloak after the MacDougalls ambushed the king at Dalrigh in 1306. The brooch had been in MacDougall keeping for over three centuries when a Covenanting army (Protestant forces who had turned Scotland’s civil wars against the royalist clans) besieged and burned Gylen in 1647. The brooch was taken in the attack and passed to the Campbells of Inverawe, who did not return it until the nineteenth century.

If your name is MacDougall, your ancestors guarded that brooch for three hundred years and built this stronghold at the edge of the sea. The castle fell, but the brooch came home in the end.