On 10 May 1719 three warships of the Royal Navy, the Worcester, the Enterprise and the Flamborough, came up Loch Alsh on the west coast of Scotland under sail, anchored within range of the small castle on its island at the meeting of three lochs, and demanded its surrender.
Inside were forty-six Spanish soldiers. They were the advance party of a Jacobite rising that had already failed. Spain, at war with Britain, had sent a fleet of twenty-seven ships and five thousand men to land in England and restore the Stuarts; a storm off Finisterre had wrecked the fleet. A second, smaller expedition, three hundred Spaniards under Scottish Jacobite officers, had landed at Eilean Donan in April, stored their powder and supplies in the castle, and marched inland to raise the clans. The clans, having heard about the storm, mostly declined. The Spaniards were left with a castle full of gunpowder and the whole of the Royal Navy coming to visit. The castle was in the keeping of the MacRaes, and the clan’s red and green MacRae tartan is the cloth this story comes back to.
The garrison refused to surrender. The frigates opened fire. Their guns knocked the medieval walls about for a while, then a landing party stormed the castle, took the Spaniards prisoner, and found three hundred and forty-three barrels of gunpowder in the cellars. They used twenty-seven of them to blow the castle up.
A month later the main body of the expedition, with the Jacobite clans that had turned out, was beaten at Glen Shiel, a few miles up the road, in the only battle ever fought on British soil by Spanish troops. The rising was over. Eilean Donan lay in ruins for nearly two hundred years.
The shirt of mail
The castle had been built in the thirteenth century against the Vikings, and for most of its life it belonged to the MacKenzies of Kintail. But the men who lived in it, held it and fought from it were the MacRaes.
The MacRaes came to Kintail in the fourteenth century and attached themselves to the MacKenzies so completely that they were called, in the Highlands, the MacKenzies’ shirt of mail: the armour the great clan put on when it went to war. They were hereditary constables of Eilean Donan, and they took part in most of the MacKenzies’ quarrels for three hundred years. They were out at Sheriffmuir in 1715, where they were cut down in great numbers in the MacKenzie regiment, and a piece of tartan said to have been worn by a MacRae on that field survived long enough to be recorded.
They were not a large clan and they never had a chief recognised by the Lord Lyon. What they had was the castle, and a reputation. Their crest is an arm holding a sword. Their motto is Fortitudine, with fortitude, and their war cry, Sgurr Uaran, is the name of a mountain above Loch Duich.
The man who rebuilt it
In 1911 a MacRae bought the ruin. He was Lieutenant-Colonel John MacRae-Gilstrap, a soldier of the Black Watch who had married an English heiress, and he had decided that the seat of his people should stand again. There were no plans of the old castle. He and his clerk of works, a local man named Farquhar MacRae, who is said to have seen the castle whole in a dream, worked from the ruins, from old drawings and from the shape of the stones, and it took them twenty years. The rebuilt castle was completed in 1932, with a stone bridge to the shore that the medieval castle never had.
It is now, by a wide margin, the most photographed castle in Scotland. It has been in more films than most actors. Its image is on shortbread tins and calendars, and coach parties from every country on earth stop on the shore at Dornie to take the picture that everyone takes. It is also still a MacRae house, run by the family’s trust, and it takes weddings.
A jumbled count
The MacRae tartan has a history as complicated as the castle’s. The archives record a clan sett published by the Smith brothers of Mauchline in 1850, with the note that a MacRae gentleman who had “bestowed a good deal of attention on clan matters” had approved it. D. C. Stewart, the great scholar, was unhappy with the thread count that had come down and suspected it had been jumbled at some point in the copying. The hunting sett is older and better documented: a Wilsons of Bannockburn pattern of about 1820, of which a specimen survives in Stirling, so like the MacKenzie tartan in structure that the archives observe the resemblance is understandable, given the two clans’ long association. Anyone who has typed where to buy kilt into a search box knows the next question is which version a maker actually weaves.
What is sold as MacRae today is a strong red and green tartan: a green ground with bands of black, a broad red band, and fine lines of blue and white through the pattern. The hunting version is green and blue in the Government family with a red line and a white one. Retailers offer MacRae tartan in both, in Modern and Ancient colours, made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes, scarves and ties, or by the yard. MacRae, McRae, MacRath, Rae and MacCrae are all the same name.
Dornie, a Thursday in September
Travis MacRae is thirty-four, from Austin, Texas, and he has been to Scotland once, at twenty-two, on a bus, and remembers stopping at Dornie to take the picture that everyone takes. He remembers being told by the driver that the castle belonged to his people. He has been planning, in some part of his mind, to come back and get married in it ever since, and on Thursday he is going to.
Between deciding to marry in a castle in Kintail and standing in it, there was a question he found harder than he expected, which was where to buy a kilt.
It was harder because the internet is full of kilts and most of them are wrong. He learned the difference between a kilt made to measure and one made in sizes, and that the second kind never quite sits. He learned that eight yards of wool is the real thing and five is fine for a fishing trip. He learned that a hire kilt in the wrong tartan for the wrong height is what most men at most weddings are actually wearing. And he learned, from a MacRae cousin in Ontario who had been through it, that the answer to where to buy kilt for a wedding at the family’s own castle was Scottish Kilt, on the grounds that it makes every kilt to the customer’s measurements, has the MacRae in both setts among its five thousand tartans, and sells the jacket, sporran, hose and the rest in the same place so a man in Texas can get the whole outfit right without owning a single piece of it first.
He sent his three measurements. He ordered the clan MacRae, red and green, eight yards, pleated to the sett. A charcoal Argyll jacket and waistcoat, because the ceremony was at one in the afternoon. A black leather sporran with an antique cantle, everything else in antique to match, green hose, black brogues. It came to Texas in seven weeks and he tried it on in his apartment with the air conditioning on full and a feeling he could not quite name.
On Thursday the loch is flat, the mountain the war cry is named for has cloud on its top, and he stands in the courtyard of the castle his clan held and lost and rebuilt, in their tartan, and waits.
His grandfather, who is eighty-four and came from San Antonio for this, and who has spent his life telling people the family were Scottish without ever seeing Scotland, stands beside him and looks at the walls.
“Navy blew this up,” he says. “1719. Twenty-seven barrels.”
“Three hundred and forty-three in the cellar, Grandpa. They used twenty-seven.”
“And a MacRae put it back.”
“Twenty years. From the stones.”
The old man is quiet for a moment. Then he reaches out and straightens the pleats at the back of his grandson’s kilt, which do not need straightening.
“Good,” he says. “That’s the family. Get blown up, put it back.”
Fortitudine
The MacRaes were never a great clan. They were the men inside the walls, the shirt of mail, the garrison, and when their castle was blown into the loch they had nothing to do but wait two hundred years for one of their own to come home and rebuild it. He did, from the stones, and the picture that everyone takes is his.
Their tartan is red and green with the blue and white lines, and it looks exactly right in that courtyard on a September afternoon, on a man from Texas who found out where to buy it from a cousin who had been through it, standing on the spot where the Spaniards stacked the powder.
