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REVIEW BY DEREK ALEXANDER
Eilean Donan Castle is indeed a Scottish icon, featuring on many calendars and in movies – Highlander for one. You can’t fail to notice it if you are driving to the Isle of Skye, as it sits on its small island in Loch Duich, protected by a screen of visitor facilities besieged by tourist buses. Of course, the castle looks like it has been preserved from the medieval period, but in fact, after it was destroyed in 1719, it lay abandoned as a ruin until it was rebuilt in the early 20th century. This excellent book reports on the excavation work undertaken around the current castle looking for the remains of the earlier, 13th-century structure.
The detailed documentary research in Chapter 2 places the castle and its owners/occupiers (Mathesons, MacDonalds, MacKenzies, and MacRaes) into the complicated historical context of the Western Highlands and the Earldom of Ross. Archaeological trenches had to be placed where best to reveal the remains of the curtain wall and the intervening towers of the earlier enclosure castle – there were reportedly seven towers at one time (although the evidence for some is slim). Of particular interest was the discovery and excavation of a blacksmith’s workshop built against the inside of the defensive wall – with hammerscale aplenty and even some ship-building rivets. The artefacts recovered from the excavation are wonderfully illustrative of the range of activities that would have been undertaken within a medieval castle, from the mundane and everyday to the rare and exotic. Every excavation needs a stand-out find, and a 13th-century gravoir, or hair-parter, graces the back cover of the book. A metaphor for the site, it is clearly following European fashion of the time but has a West Highland twist – made of red deer antler, it appears to show a medieval cleric or saint: St Donan himself?
This well-illustrated monograph makes a very strong contribution to our understanding of one of Scotland’s best-known strongholds, and I hope the results from this work will be interpreted on-site for the army of visitors. It would have been good to see a reconstruction drawing to contrast with Miket and Roberts’ view of the 17th-century castle (see R Miket and D L Roberts, The Mediaeval Castles of Skye and Lochalsh, 1990).
Eilean Donan Castle: Exploring a Highland icon, archaeological research excavations 2009-2017 Cecily Shakespeare, Jonathan Clark, Justin Garner-Lahire, Richard Oram, and Nicola Toop Oxbow Books, £25 ISBN 978-8888570549
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