Eilean Donan Castle

Eilean Donan takes its name from Donnán of Eigg, an Irish saint martyred on Eigg in 617; an early monastic cell may have stood on the island and been dedicated to him, though no trace of it survives, and fragments of vitrified stone found there point to an earlier Iron Age or early medieval fort. The stone castle itself was raised in the earlier thirteenth century, during the reign of Alexander II, as a large curtain-walled enclosure commanding the boundary between the Norse-Celtic Lordship of the Isles and the Earldom of Ross. Clan tradition credits its building to a son of a Matheson chief who had gained the power to speak with birds and, after adventures overseas, won Alexander II's favour and was asked to build the castle to defend the realm.

The island became the stronghold of the Mackenzies of Kintail, vassals of William I, Earl of Ross, garrisoned by their allies the Macraes and Maclennans. Mackenzie clan histories tell how Earl William, seeking advantage from the 1266 Treaty of Perth that ceded the Hebrides to Scotland, demanded the castle back from his kinsman Kenneth Mackenzie; Mackenzie refused and repulsed the earl's assault. The same histories claim, without contemporary corroboration, that Robert the Bruce sheltered here in the winter of 1306–07. Ahead of a visit by Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, in 1331, fifty wrongdoers were rounded up and executed, their heads displayed on the castle walls to Moray's approval. The Macraes, who had migrated from the Beauly Firth, became the Mackenzie lairds' bodyguards, earning the name "Mackenzie's shirt of mail."

In 1539 Donald Gorm Macdonald of Sleat, finding the castle weakly garrisoned with only a constable and a warden, launched a surprise attack; both defenders were killed by arrows, but Duncan MacGillechriosd of Clan Macrae killed several attackers at the postern gate and fatally wounded Donald Gorm with his last arrow before the Macdonalds withdrew. A further feud with the MacDonalds of Glengarry, breaking out in 1580, included a sea skirmish off Kyle Rhea around 1602 in which Angus, son of MacDonald of Glengarry, was killed.

In 1715 William Mackenzie, 5th Earl of Seaforth, brought out the Mackenzies and Macraes for the Jacobite rising led by the Earl of Mar; the Macraes mustered at Eilean Donan and are said to have danced on its roof before marching to the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir, where fifty-eight Macraes were among the Jacobite dead. After that rising collapsed, Spain took up the Jacobite cause: in April 1719 an advance party of 300 Spanish soldiers under George Keith, Earl Marischal, occupied Eilean Donan ahead of a planned invasion that never arrived. On 10 May 1719 three Royal Navy frigates, HMS Worcester, Flamborough and Enterprise, opened fire on the castle after its garrison fired on a boat sent under a flag of truce; the bombardment continued into the next day before a landing party took the castle. The Worcester's log recorded the garrison as an Irish captain, a Spanish lieutenant and sergeant, one Scottish rebel and 39 Spanish soldiers, along with 343 barrels of gunpowder. The navy landed 27 barrels of that powder, and the castle was destroyed when it exploded; the surviving Spanish troops were defeated a month later at the Battle of Glen Shiel.

The castle lay in ruins for two centuries until Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap rebuilt it between 1919 and 1932, adding an arched footbridge to the island and a war memorial to Macrae clansmen killed in the First World War, inscribed with lines from John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields." Opened to the public in 1955, the castle passed in 1983 to the Conchra Charitable Trust, established by the Macrae family, which opened a purpose-built visitor centre on the mainland side of the bridge in 1998. It has been a category A listed building since 1971 and stands within the Kintail National Scenic Area.