Airds Castle

For much of the later Middle Ages, Airds Castle stood as a stronghold of the Lord of the Isles, occupying a headland between Carradale harbour and the bay of Port Righ. Held into the late 1400s, it helped guard the frontier between territory controlled by the Lordship and land answering directly to the Scottish crown, giving a small castle real strategic weight along the Kintyre coast and over the crossing to Arran.

After the Lordship of the Isles was forfeited in the late fifteenth century, Airds Castle came under royal control. In 1498 James IV granted it, with other Kintyre property, to the Ayrshire landholder Sir Adam Reid of Stairquhite and Barskimming, bringing an outside family into a stronghold formerly held by the western seaboard's rulers.

By the middle of the sixteenth century the lands around Airds Castle had become part of the barony of Bar in North Kintyre, held by the MacDonalds of Dunnyveg, a powerful branch of Clan Donald whose main seat lay at Dunyveg on Islay. Their possession of the barony shows how quickly control of this stretch of Kintyre could shift between the crown's grantees and the region's older ruling families.

The Reid family of Barskimming had recovered possession of the lands by 1605, bringing the estate back into the hands into which James IV had first placed it a little over a century earlier. No detailed record explains exactly how or when the change took place, but the reversal underlines how contested this small headland and its surrounding barony remained across the 1500s.

Airds Castle was designated a scheduled monument in 1972, giving legal protection to what by then was a ruin reduced to fragmentary walls on its headland. The designation preserved the site as physical evidence of the long contest for control of North Kintyre, from the Lordship of the Isles through royal grantees to the rival families who held the barony of Bar.