Duart Castle Restoration Appeal

24/10/2026

Due to the storm, we’ve decided to close the castle for Sunday 25th October.

The tearoom and shop will still be open however.

If you need respite from the awful weather, why not indulge in one of our seasonal roasted pumpkin and Mull cheese scones with a savoury cream tea.

24/10/2026

June 2027 will be an amazing International Gathering of Clan Maclean don’t miss it!

19/10/2026

In 1911, a Maclean chief bought back the ruined castle his family had lost more than two centuries earlier. Then came the harder part: making it stand again. 🏰

Duart Castle sits on a headland above the Sound of Mull. Its great keep was built in the fourteenth century for Lachlan Lubanach Maclean, and its landward wall is still about nine metres high and three metres thick. For generations it was the heart of the clan.

Then the family's fortunes broke. After the civil wars of the seventeenth century the Maclean estates were deep in debt, and the Campbell Earls of Argyll acquired the castle in the 1670s, a generation after the clan's heavy losses at Inverkeithing in 1651. Duart was garrisoned now and then but was not lived in. By 1748 the tower was roofless and derelict, and by the early twentieth century it was a shell owned by Murray Guthrie of neighbouring Torosay.

In September 1911 Guthrie sold the ruin to Sir Fitzroy Maclean, 26th chief of Clan Maclean. He was 76 years old, a cavalry officer who had served in the Crimea. Speaking to a gathering of Macleans that year, he said simply that the ancient stronghold of the Macleans was now his property, and he noted that it had been 221 years since the Maclean banner had flown over it.

He did not leave it as a romantic ruin. Sir Fitzroy brought in the architect John James Burnet, and Historic Environment Scotland's records describe the castle being restored and partly reconstructed in 1911 and 1912 around the old keep. The clan account says the work continued into the years before the First World War. Masons, joiners and labourers turned broken walls back into rooms where a family could live, and in August 1912 Macleans gathered at Duart to mark the restoration.

Sir Fitzroy lived there until his death at Duart in 1936, aged 101. His descendants still live in the castle, and it still needs constant care against the Atlantic weather.

Some families lose their stones and keep only the story. This one got the stones back.

Does your family have a place it lost long ago, and would you go back to it if you could?

10/10/2026

17/09/2026

The Clan Maclean International Gathering returns to Mull in June 2027 — five days of kinship, history, and celebration at Tobermory, Iona, and Duart Castle. From the unveiling of the Gruiline memorial to guided walks, island pilgrimages, concerts, and the Chief’s Ball, this is a rare chance for Macleans worldwide to stand together on ancestral ground.
22–26 June 2027 — Mull awaits the clan.
Programme: https://www.maclean.org/maclean-associations/cma-scotland/cmas/2027/

04/09/2026

03/09/2026

Seven Macleans died one after another so that a single man could live, and each one said the same four words as he stepped forward. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

The place was Inverkeithing in Fife, the date the twentieth of July 1651. Sir Hector Maclean of Duart, called Eachann Ruadh nan Cath, Red Hector of the Battles, had brought around eight hundred of his clansmen south to fight for Charles II against Cromwell's army. The Scottish force was outmatched and the day was going badly. Hector was surrounded.

What is said to have happened next is remembered in Gaelic in four words. Fear eile airson Eachainn. Another for Hector. One clansman after another put himself bodily between his chief and the blades coming for him, and as each one fell the next stepped up and said it again. Seven of them, according to the tradition, and by some accounts all of them brothers. Hector died anyway. So did the great majority of the Macleans on that field. Of the eight hundred who marched out of Mull, fewer than forty came home.

Duart Castle sits on its black rock at the mouth of the Sound of Mull and it has watched almost everything. The Macleans held it from the fourteenth century. They lost it, along with nearly all of Mull, in the long ruin that followed the Jacobite years, and by the nineteenth century the place was a roofless shell used as a store. The clan motto is Virtue Mine Honour. That is a strange thing to keep saying once the land is gone.

Then in 1911 Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the twenty sixth chief, by then in his late eighties, bought the ruin back and restored it. Macleans came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States to stand in it. They still come.

A clan is not a castle and it is not a hillside. It is a promise that somebody will step forward. 🪻 The blood remembers.