Old Castle Lachlan

The Maclachlans' hold on this shore of Loch Fyne is documented from 1292, when Gilleskel Maclachlan received a charter from John, King of Scots, for the lands known as Strathlachlan on the loch's eastern side. A further record in 1314 names the site itself as Castlelachlan, though nothing survives today of whatever fourteenth-century stronghold that name first described; the ruin now standing belongs to a later rebuilding entirely.

The enclosure visible today took shape in the early fifteenth century, with the buildings inside it added during the later part of that century, and architectural evidence has led some to place the design as late as the sixteenth. In 1574 the crown granted Archibald MacLachlan, the fifteenth chief, a charter confirming his family's hold on the lands of Cowal and Glasrie to him and his male heirs bearing the Maclachlan name and arms.

Clan loyalties through the seventeenth century drew the Maclachlans into national conflict on more than one occasion: they aided the MacGregors at the Battle of Glen Fruin in 1603, and fought for the crown at the Battle of Alford in 1645. In 1680 the clan's holdings were consolidated when Strathlachlan was erected into a free barony, formally uniting the family's lands under a single name.

The Maclachlans kept faith with the exiled Stuarts long after the Campbells across the loch had settled with the government. Lachlan Maclachlan, the seventeenth chief, supported Viscount Dundee at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689 and rallied to James VIII in the 1715 rising; when Charles Edward Stuart raised his banner at Glen Shiel in 1745, the chief gathered a hundred men and marched east to Holyrood in Edinburgh.

On 16 April 1746 Lachlan Maclachlan led a regiment of 115 of his own clansmen and 182 MacLeans of Mull, whose own chief had failed to arrive, into the Battle of Culloden alongside Clan Mackintosh and Clan Chattan. After surviving a Hanoverian artillery barrage the Jacobites pressed an offensive but were outnumbered and driven back; the chief himself was struck by a cannonball and killed, his body found afterwards behind the government lines.

In the rout that followed, the Maclachlans were forced to abandon their castle, and it was bombarded from the sea later in 1746 on the orders of the Duke of Cumberland, after which it was never again lived in and has stood as a ruin since. A 1748 letter from Rev. John MacLachlan of Kilchoan to the Bishop of Ross and Caithness recorded the chief's service and death, complaining that the newspapers of the day had overlooked him entirely.

Through the intervention of the Duke of Argyll, the family's confiscated lands were restored on 18 November 1749 to Robert MacLachlan, the eighteenth chief, then only fourteen years old, though the castle was never rebuilt as a residence. Since 2011 Clan MacLachlan has run a conservation programme at the ruin, using traditional masonry to arrest erosion and prevent collapse, alongside its protection as a scheduled monument.