Achanduin Castle

Long before any stonework rose on the ridge, pieces of worked stone of a prehistoric type turned up among the excavation layers, hinting that the hilltop had already drawn attention thousands of years earlier; traces of what may have been an earlier structure beneath the castle's footprint point to occupation stretching back well before the thirteenth century, though its nature remains unclear.

Around 1290 a fortified enclosure went up on the ridge, built not by the Bishop of Argyll as long assumed but by the MacDougalls, whose control of Lorn and Lismore made them the only local power with the resources for such a project. At the time, the Bishop of Argyll, Laurence de Ergadia, may himself have belonged to the same family, blurring the line between church authority and clan power on the island.

The earliest written record of the castle appears in a grant of 1304, when Eugenil de Ergadia, Lord of Lorn, Morvern and Lismore, made over lands beside Achichendone — Achanduin — to Andrew, Bishop of Argyll. The document confirms that a MacDougall lord, not the bishopric, still held the castle and the ground around it at that date, thirty years after it was likely raised.

The MacDougalls were forfeited in 1308 after the Battle of the Pass of Brander cost them Dunstaffnage Castle and most of their lands, though Lismore goes unmentioned in the surviving records of redistribution, suggesting they may have kept the island regardless. It had already been promised elsewhere as the dowry for Juliana MacDougall's marriage to Alexander MacDonald, later Lord of the Isles, and their refusal to hand it over drew England's Edward I into the dispute on the MacDonalds' side.

Archaeological evidence points to a long quiet spell at Achanduin, with little sign of occupation from around 1400 until the site was pressed back into use as a farmstead between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The once-defended ridge had become ordinary agricultural ground, its unused walls slowly collapsing around whatever farm buildings stood in the old courtyard.

By 1451 John Maol had been granted Dunolly and other lands by John Stewart, Lord of Lorn, and it was around this time that the MacDougalls are believed to have left Lismore for the mainland to build Dunollie Castle. Within a year the Bishop of Argyll appears to have gained possession of Achanduin and occupied it briefly, though the evidence suggests bishops rarely visited Lismore even once the castle was theirs.

Between 1970 and 1975 the archaeologist Dennis Turner excavated the site across six summer seasons, working mostly in August. He died before completing his report, and it fell to David H Caldwell and Geoffrey P Stell to finish it from his notes, working at a disadvantage since the excavation predated modern recording methods and some of Turner's notes proved difficult to interpret.