Dunscaith Castle

Dunscaith Castle stands on a detached mass of rock on the coast of Sleat, on the Isle of Skye, its walls rising some forty feet above the sea. A gap of about twenty feet once cut it off from the shore, spanned by a walled stone bridge whose arches led on to a drawbridge — a defensive arrangement that made the seat all but unassailable. The stronghold is thought to have taken shape in the fourteenth century, its early history bound up with the MacAskills, a family of Norse descent who held it until the closing years of that century. Thereafter it changed hands repeatedly as the great Hebridean clans contested the region: the MacDonalds of Sleat, the MacLeods, and briefly the MacAskills again all laid claim, until James IV seized the castle during his campaign to break the power of the Lords of the Isles. The MacDonalds nonetheless kept possession, abandoning the site only in the early seventeenth century. Today parts of the curtain wall, roughly five feet thick, still cling to the cliff edge, though most of the inner buildings have gone. In older tradition the rock is remembered as Dun Scaithaigh, the fortress of the warrior-woman Scathach, who in the Ulster Cycle trained the hero Cu Chulainn in arms.