Just describing where this lovely place is underlines why it is one of our Argyll and the Isles’ Secrets Collection.
It’s in west Cowal, on the eastern shores of Loch Fyne, tucked away off the single track B8000 for Otter Ferry, itself off the A886 which leaves the A815 at Strachur, the road running from the A83 in Glen Kinglas to Dunoon.
It’s not a quick place to zip up to, grab and go. It takes time and by the time you get there you have adjusted to the time and the rhythm of the place itself.
There are serious creature comforts to hand though. If you time your visit right, the celebrated Inver Cottage restaurant - informal, friendly, with great food, a little bar and a fire in a sort of New England style interior – is on the shore of Lachlan Bay, looking straight at the old Castle Lachlan; and with the new, white, Castle Lachlan away on its right.
The 15th century Old Castle Lachlan was the home of the Chiefs of the local Maclachlan Clan. One of the oldest of the Highland clans, the Maclachlans are descended from Lachlan Mor, himself said to be a descendant of Anrothan O’Neill, an 11th century Irish prince who left Ireland and who was thought to descend from the 4th-5th century High King of Ireland, Niall Noigiallach.
The last-but-one Chief, the 24th Maclachlan of Maclachlan, Marjorie, known as Marnie, died in 1996 and is buried nearby at St Maelrhuba’s Chapel – or Old Kilmorie Chapel – which became the Maclachlan mausoleum.
Her husband, George Stiles Rome, who took her Maclachlan name, predeceased her by two years and is buried on the opposite side of the entrance to the chapel. He was also Maclachlan of Maclachlan, but his wife was the Chief and we noted that the higher ground had been reserved for her.
Old Castle Lachlan is a Class A listed building and a scheduled ancient monument, an unusual kind of fortress castle, out on a headland projecting into Loch Fyne, on a site which has had a castle on it since 1314. Inside its square outer walls it has two houses around a courtyard, connected by a small room over a cistern used to collect fresh water; and a circular stair. Once upon a time, timber stairs and galleries in the courtyard itself gave access to first floor rooms. [The charitable Lachlan Trust's plan for the conservation of old Castle Lachlan is here.]
In 1680 Charles II made the Maclachlan lands a barony; so the Clan Chief is Baron of Strathlachlan.
Until the 1700s, the castle was the focal point for a village and the 13th century chapel of St Maelrhuba – Kilmorie Chapel – nearby.
The old castle’s story is knitted into that most romantic part of the fabric of Scotland’s troubled history, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The Maclachlan chief, a Jacobite, was killed at Culloden, more a massacre than a battle and the event that brought an end to the dream of the Stuart restoration.
Local legend has it that after the death of the Chief, an English warship came up Loch Fyne and knocked seven bells our of the castle, Historians say there is little evidence of that but the castle was not inhabited after Culloden.
The Lachlan Trust that raises funds for the preservation of the old castle, currently part-scaffolded, records the local tale that when the Maclachlan Chief died at Culloden his horse made its way back home alone, refused ever to leave the castle again and eventually died there.
When the times settled down after the upheaval of 1745 [the rebellion that could have succeeded if they had kept their nerve], the new, white rendered, Castle Lachlan was built by the Maclachlans nearby. It is now available for rent on a self catering basis.
The new castle was built in 1790, by Donald Maclachlan the 19th Chief, in the landscaped setting which was the mode of the times. This involved changing the course of the River Lachlan, planting avenues of trees and, as with the Dukes of Argyll’s seat at Inveraray Castle to the north west on the opposite shore of Loch Fyne, dismantling the village to enhance the amenity of the new castle.
Only the medieval Kilmorie Chapel was left, with the Maclachlan clan chiefs buried there.
The unique little chapel – said to be one of the few remaining medieval church structures in the west of Scotland – almost collapsed in the early 21st century but was successfully conserved by the Trust after they raised £100,000 to do so.
Known also as Kilmorie Chapel and Strathlachlan Church, the chapel is principally named for an early Irish monk, St Maelrhuba, whose birth in Derry, on the north coast of Ireland, in 642 is recorded in the Annals of Ulster.
Maelrhuba was descended from the King of Ulster, Niall of the Nine Hostages; and his mother’s uncle was St Comgal of Dalriada, the kingdom that once embraced the north east of Ireland and Argyll.
Comgal founded a monastery at Bangor where Maelrhuba studied but when he was around 30 years of age he decided to follow in the footsteps – or in the wake of the curragh – of St Columba and evangelise in Scotland.
He and his group of devotees spent a couple of years travelling Argyll, leaving a number of sites named for him, some in Knapdale, where, south of Castle Sween, there is another Kilmory Chapel. The name was clearly adopted in Argyll, with the mansion in Lochgilphead that became the HQ of Argyll and Bute Council called Kilmory Castle – although there are those who call it Castle Greystoke.
Kilmory is a compound name made of ‘Cil’ meaning ‘church’ and ‘Mory’ – a corruption of Maelrhuba.
There are six ‘Kilmory’ sites in Argyll and researcher-storyteller Patsy Dyer has found 130 in Scotland as a whole, one, for example, up on Loch Maree in Wester Ross. He was clearly a popular saint.
Kilmorie Chapel and burial ground at Strachlachlan, a little north of the new castle, with its entrance on the west side of the B8000 and with a decent sized car parking layby opposite, ia approached by a straight formal path, through a less formal inner gate.
With glimpses of the loch, it is a wooded circular site whose circularity is thought to indicate a Celtic past, although there is no evidence of anything pre-Christian.
It is immediately tranquil, serene, certain of itself, its gravestones, as they do, telling stories of relationships and premature loss – a Lachlan father, Peter, burying his 22 year old son in 1866, named for himself so possibly a firstborn; then burying his wife, ‘Marthu’ Macpherson in 1880 at the age of 71; and recorded as dying himself 18 years after her at the age of 90.
The carving on the gravestones shows evidence of the pragmatic way earlier stonemasons made corrections – and testifies to the unstable spelling of the time.
Old gravestones tell us clearly of the instability of spelling in the days before dictionaries.
Texting and the move away from precision in early learning is returning our own culture to an understanding of the engines and the consequences of the instability of spelling which led to the production of the first dictionaries. These were born from attempts to enrich the accuracy of communication by standardising the spelling of words. It was helpful to be able to be certain whether a message was about ‘an unsteady gait’ or ‘an unsteady gate’.
Standard spelling didn’t matter until we had print, of course; and at that point we had both the need and the means to produce dictionaries.
The need was serious because the English language was growing fast, under the influence of words drawn from the languages of other cultures – like Latin from the Romans – and from the languages of the settling peoples following victorious invasions.
The records of the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] indicate that the number of words available to those speaking English at least doubled between 1500 and 1650.
The first dictionary came in a 1538 Latin-English ‘wordbook’ by Sir Thomas Elyot, with around 20 others coming between that and the publication on 15th April 1755 of Samuel Johnston’s singlehanded massive work, A Dictionary of the Engliah Language. This is, with good reason, regarded as the greatest single achievement of scholarship and the most influential.
The earliest gravestone at Kilmorie Chapel is 1786, which sets things in time in terms of the growing standardisation of the language. The earliest one we found was this one from a little later, in 1789, showing spelling still in transition.
Kilmorie Chapel as it now stands, is part of the original parish church which was abandoned in 1782 with the building of a new one in the vicinity. The chapel is said to have originally been three times as long as it was wide – which were the required proportions of the middle ages.
Some say that you can still trace the foundations of the destroyed part of the chapel, running away westwards.
The Canmore archive of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Records of Scotland [RCAHMS] has the burial ground here containing 123 gravestone, with the earliest at 1786 and the most recent in 1997. Today’s new graves are being installed at the margins of the path approaching from the road to the old inner burial ground.
This is a restful and beautiful place, redolent of a local history affected directly by the larger events of its own times and, between castle, chapel and burial ground, enabling a complex piece of time-travelling for the visitor.
Note: You can make donations to the work of the charitable Lachlan Trust online here.
Other articles in the Argyll and the Isles’ Secrets’ Collection:
- Argyll and the Isles Secrets Collection: The bird hide at Ettrick Bay
- Argyll and the Isles Secrets Collection: The view from Aqualibrium – and the Dorlin
- Argyll and the Isles’ Secrets Collection: St Munns and the Argyll Mausoleum
- Argyll and the Isles’ Secrets Colletion: Otter Ferry at Port Ann
- Argyll and the Isles’ Secrets Collection: The Brainport Alignment
- Argyll and the Isles’ Secrets Collection: The Watchman
