Rubha an Dùnain

During the Mesolithic period, hunter-gatherers used a small rock shelter on the headland north of the loch, the earliest known trace of human presence on the peninsula. Sometime in the second or third millennium BC, a chambered cairn — a communal stone burial mound — was raised nearby, followed in time by a separate passage grave, adding a further layer of prehistoric burial to the same stretch of ground.

South of the loch stands a dun, a small drystone fortified tower, thought on the basis of its form to belong to the Iron Age. Its presence gave the peninsula its Gaelic name, Rubha an Dùnain, meaning 'point of the little fort', a name that has outlasted the people who built and used the structure by well over a thousand years.

Along the stream linking the loch to the sea, an artificial canal was cut at some point in the past, long attributed by local tradition to Viking builders. In 2000 a local archaeologist recovered a timber from the loch belonging to a Norse-style clinker-built faering, a light open boat, which was later carbon dated to around AD 1100, giving the first hard evidence for the harbour's medieval use.

In May 2009 an archaeological survey sponsored by Historic Scotland identified stone-built quays around the loch together with a system for maintaining a constant water level, allowing boats such as birlinns to be floated out to sea at high tide. Historic Environment Scotland later described the result as a rare medieval harbour complex with no close parallel identified anywhere else for its combination of age and complexity.

In 2011 the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland carried out aerial surveys of the peninsula in the hope of locating further remains. The marine archaeologist Dr Colin Martin, who summarised the findings in a report titled 'A Highway into History', judged that the site held enormous potential to reveal how boats were built, serviced and sailed on Scotland's western seaboard across the medieval and possibly earlier periods.

In the centuries after the Viking era, Rubha an Dùnain became the hereditary home of Clan MacAskill, a sept of Clan MacLeod who served as coast-watchers and bodyguards. A farming community grew up on the peninsula, including an 18th-century tacksman's house, and by the early 19th century the associated farm had grown to some 37,500 acres, directly supporting around 70 men and their families.

The community did not survive the Highland Clearances. Many of the clan's leaders emigrated to the United States, New Zealand and Cape Breton in Nova Scotia as the farm broke up, and no record of any occupants on the peninsula survives after the census of 1861, after which Rubha an Dùnain has remained uninhabited.