Clan Macrae - Eilean Donan Castle - Photo Print

Photographer Aly Wight took this photograph from the Kintail hillside, looking across Loch Duich through bare winter trees and gorse to Eilean Donan on its tidal island. The wide spread of the loch and the mountains behind give a sense of the territory this fortress commanded.

Eilean Donan was Mackenzie country. But the MacRaes were the people who held it. Installed as hereditary constables from the early sixteenth century, they served with such fierce loyalty that the Mackenzies called them their ‘shirt of mail.’ In 1539, when a MacDonald fleet sailed up the loch to besiege the castle, it was a MacRae who ended the siege, killing the MacDonald chief with a single arrow from the walls.

If your name is Macrae, your ancestors were the people the Mackenzies trusted with the defence of their greatest stronghold. That was the MacRae place here, for generations.