Carrick Castle

The castle is a rectangular tower house set on a rocky peninsula on the west shore of Loch Goil, between Cuilmuich and Carrick. At one time a narrow channel separated the tower from the shoreline, giving it an islandlike position; that channel later silted up. Defences facing the land included a ditch crossed by a drawbridge, features recorded in the site’s layout and archaeology.

The main tower measures roughly twenty by twelve metres and rises to about twenty metres. The walls are approximately seven feet thick, and the plan provided two floors above a central great hall. After the 1685 attack the keep lost its roof and stood as a ruin for many decades; substantial restoration from 1988 has rebuilt wide portions of the original tower and returned much of it to use, while parts still reflect its ruined state.

Two cellar rooms survive within the core of the building. These spaces are set directly onto roughly shaped bedrock and measure about four and three metres across. Excavation showed a clay layer up to around half a metre in places, and later work filled the cellars chiefly with stone rubble during a subsequent phase of alteration. That deliberate infill is visible in the archaeological sequence and in the fabric where stone compacted into the lower spaces.

Later repairs and additions are visible against the medieval tower. Renovation episodes introduced worked stone set with a clay mortar in parts of the masonry, reflecting changes in building technique over time. A smaller seventeenth-century structure adjoins the original rectangular tower and survives as an attached appendage. A small chimney inserted into a former window recess is a particular curiosity in the surviving fabric. Much of the masonry that remained after centuries of decay was removed in the Victorian era, and the 1988 work has carefully rebuilt many sections while leaving evidence of the building’s long history.