|
Ardvreck Castle
We spent that night further north at Kylesku, which looks up into northern Sutherland, the extreme north-westerly part of Scotland. The next morning we went south, keen now to see Loch Assynt and Ardvreck Castle. Whilst Leod’s eldest son Tormod inherited Syke, Harris and Glenelg, the younger one, Torquil, received the Island of Lewis (which was named after Leod) and founded his own Clan, MacLeod of Lewis, which is also regarded as an offshoot of the main MacLeod clan of Skye. Torquil married the heiress of the MacNicols of Assynt and Lewis (who had held the area for about a century before the coming of Leod) in 1314, and later in 1343 King David II of Scotland granted it to his son Torquil in return for the service of a 20-oared Hebridean galley, an essential tool in maintaining royal authority in the Western Isles.
The MacLeods of Assynt multiplied into a formidable clan, based in their castle of Ardvreck, pictured above. They were a querulous lot, and the dungeon at Ardvreck was often full of other MacLeods, or their near neighbours.
The family was a very romantic one – and it was also extraordinarily violent. In the generation of the sons of Angus Mor MacLeod in the sixteenth century, for example, one of the sons was murdered by his brother, who was in turn killed in revenge by one of his father’s illegitimate offspring. The next brother was Neil the Tutor, who had a dispute with the final sibling, Houstian. Neil invited Houstian and Houstian’s son Dougal to Ardvreck. Having got them drunk, Neil drew his dirk and stabbed them both through the heart, despatching them in cold blood in their own family castle, in flagrant violation of the laws of hospitality and the bonds of kinship. Neil was executed for this dastardly act in Edinburgh in 1581. His and Houstian’s remaining sons called a temporary truce to oust their semi-crippled nephew, Angus, who had come of age, but soon the thugs fell out amongst themselves over fishing rights, and soon the bodies were piling up again in an internecine civil war that left Assynt awash with blood.
The prize for the most utter venality, however, must go to the unnamed chief of the MacLeods of Assynt whose story appears in The Sutherland Book:
One night an elegantly dressed gentleman called at Ardvreck and was entertained, meagre though the fare was. During the meal he disclosed his identity as the Devil and proposed that for the soul of MacLeod he was prepared to reverse the fortunes of the family and make the crumbling castle of Ardvreck finer than Dunvegan itself.
MacLeod was afraid and declined, but the Devil was not to be outdone. Waiting at table was the beautiful young daughter of the house who was impressed by the stranger and the interest he was taking in her. The association grew as the days passed and, in the end, the Devil proposed a new plan to MacLeod. For the hand of the daughter, he would restore the MacLeod fortunes just as if it was the soul of MacLeod he had won.
MacLeod, in his greed, consented and the unsuspecting daughter was given in marriage to the stranger. The wedding celebrations were the grandest ever seen in the west but just as the couple were leaving the castle after the wedding to sail to the shore a violent thunderstorm broke out. The couple sailed into the darkness and were never seen again. MacLeod received nothing of the fortune the Devil promised him and when he died his line expired. Today the castle stands in ruins on its island in Loch Assynt. On nights when thunder rolls in the surrounding hills and lightning plays on the dark loch, the screams of a woman can be heard and a figure in white is seen weeping on the stony beach by the ruined castle.
Very few families can claim the Devil as an in-law, but the MacLeods of Assynt can!
In 1650, Neil MacLeod (1628-c. 1702), 10th baron of Assynt, blotted his historical copybook by capturing the glamorous Royalist commander the Marquis of Montrose sending him to his death on the executioner’s block in Edinburgh. As the local sheriff depute, Neil was only doing his duty, but the act appalled many, and in Aytoun’s The Execution of Montrose we read that:
A traitor sold him to his foes;
O deed of deatless shame!
I charge thee, boy, if e’er thou meet
With one of Assynt’s name -
Be it upon the mountain’s side,
Or yet within the glen,
Stand he in martial gear alone,
Or backed by armed men -
Face him, as thou wouldst face the man
Who wronged thy sire’s renown;
Remember of what blood thou are,
And strike the caitiff down!
… an injunction happily not practised on Scott, at any point in our journey, despite his telling everyone his grandmother had been a MacLeod! After Charles II was restored in 1660, however, Neil MacLeod became politically isolated. Particular enmity had always existed between the MacLeods and the MacKenzies of Ross-shire. Now they started buying up Neil’s debts and, in December 1671, they claimed Assynt as their own. The sheriff came to order the MacLeods to leave, but they refused to obey the royal official’s orders and tried to brain him with a rock.
In June 1672 the Mackenzies obtained ‘letters of fire and sword'– authority to use force – and invaded Ardvreck. Under Neils’s son-in-law John MacLeod, the garrison of 18 held out for two weeks until faced with a formidable siege engine made by Sir George MacKenzie of Tarbat. Realising the game was up, they surrendered and were expelled from their ancient seat. The MacKenzies built an elegant mansion, Calder House, on the shores of the loch, the ruins of which are pictured below. The idea was to be able to look out on their captured castle and reflect on the humiliation of their ancient foes, but their act of vanity cost so much that in 1739 they went bankrupt and their estates were bought by the Earls of Sutherland in 1757.
One branch of the MacLeods of Lewis retained land-owning status, on Raasay, off the eastern coast of Skye, which we could see from our B&B window whilst staying at Portree. They held on until 1846, and a descendant of theirs has been recognised by Lord Lyon as The MacLeod of Lewis. It was not hard, however, to see how the rest of this once-powerful clan, whose wealth was based mainly in cattle, could be reduced by time and fate to the status of tenant farmers, only to suffer further degradation in the Highland Clearances.
As we approached Loch Assynt, therefore, and saw Ardvreck castle for the first time, we knew that this could very easily be the home of the ancestors of Alice MacLeod, who went to Glasgow to become a servant.
The ruins of the little castle, recently shored-up by the Historic Assynt Trust, are indescribably romantic, standing in their proud dishevelment on the little windswept island, connected to shore by a single boggy track. The MacKenzies, whose ruined house can be seen just down the strand, let it deteriorate, and in 1795, in an incident worthy of Byron’s Romantic imagination, it was struck by lightning. The stones we can see now belong to two phases of building, one in about 1500 and the second about 1590. We know little of life there, but we know they had a watchman (a ‘cocker’) and doorkeeper, and that in February 1649 the aged Donald MacLeod of Assynt made an oath ‘in the Castle hall of Ardbrak… sitting in his schear [chair] and taking Tobacco thairin be Ten hours before noone’.
|
