Dunvegan Castle Building

The castle is situated on an outstanding mass of partly columnar basalt approximately 30 feet in height arising from the shores of Loch Dunvegan. Around it originally the sea ebbed and flowed. Now after centuries on natural deposits of silt, and assised by the modern needs of supplying an entrance from the land, the sea has receded from that side of the castle. The top of the rock is more-or-less level and forms a roughly oval platform indented on the North-West sector, the long access lying to th North-West and South-East. This platform measures about 175 feet in length and 110 feet in it's greatest breadth.

The rock descends all around fairly vertically to the short scree slopes that blanket its base, except in the indent on its North-western quarter, where there is a kind of "slack" in the cliff, up which a doubly-curved flight of rough cut stone steps mounts to the sea gate. Before the opening of the first landward door in 1748, this was the only entrance to the castle, adn very likely from remotest times there has been an access to the summit of the rock at this point.

Leod's Original Fort Circa 1200.

Close to the rock itself from the North-West corner to the sea-gate and also at the base of the Fairy Tower, sections of rough stonework indicate the last remains of 13th centuary fortifications. Leod died about 1280. In his day a massive curtain wall totally enclosed the rock, leaving a single access where the sea gate is now, heavily defended by a Barbican yett (door) and portcullis. The building inside would have been thatched. The wall dates from an earlier fort on this site, possibley predating Leod by as much as 1000 years.

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