Castle Stalker

Castle Stalker is a four-storey tower house standing on a small tidal islet in Loch Laich, an inlet of Loch Linnhe on the coast of Argyll. It owes its fame almost entirely to its setting: a single grey keep rising from a rock just big enough to hold it, reflected in still water,. The image is so complete that it has become one of the best-known views in the Highlands; at high water the castle seems to float.

A first fort on the site is thought to have been built around 1320 by the MacDougalls, Lords of Lorn. The Stewarts of Appin, who took over the lordship later in the fourteenth century, rebuilt it in its present form in the 1440s, and the castle is considered one of the best-preserved medieval tower houses in the west of Scotland. Local tradition tells that it passed to the Campbells around 1620 after a Stewart laird gave it away in a drunken wager, and it changed hands between the two clans more than once in the turbulent century that followed. The Campbells finally abandoned it around 1840, and the roof fell in.

Its revival is a twentieth-century story. Charles Stewart bought the ruin in 1908 and carried out basic conservation; in 1965 Lieutenant Colonel D. R. Stewart Allward acquired it and spent about ten years restoring it as a habitable tower, and it is still privately owned by the family. Film audiences know it from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it has since appeared in several other films and series. The castle is a Category A listed building.

Getting there

Castle Stalker lies just off the A828 between Oban and Glen Coe, about 2.5 km northeast of Port Appin and roughly 32 km southwest of Fort William. The airport nearest in a straight line is Campbeltown (CAL), about 128 km away across the sea lochs, and most visitors arrive by road from Oban or from Glen Coe. The classic view is from the shore of the loch beside the A828; the castle interior can be seen only on its open dates.