What the Stone Remembers: Duart Castle and the Macleans of Mull
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What the Stone Remembers: Duart Castle and the Macleans of Mull
Duart Castle stands on a basalt headland above the Sound of Mull, its walls rising from the same volcanic rock that formed sixty million years ago. For seven centuries it has been the seat of Clan Maclean - built, lost, fought over, abandoned, and restored. This is its story.
What the Stone Remembers is a narrative history of one of Scotland's great clans, told through the castle that defined them. It begins with the geology of the headland and ends with the flag of Clan Maclean flying above walls that were ruins within living memory. Between those two points lies one of the most dramatic stories in Scottish history - a story of ambition, loyalty, betrayal, dispossession, and the extraordinary human capacity to remember what has been lost.
The Macleans rose to power in the fourteenth century through a marriage that was equal parts love story and armed kidnapping. At the height of the Lordship of the Isles they were among the most powerful clans in the western Highlands, commanding a fleet of galleys that made them the dominant military force on the western seaboard. They produced warriors, scholars, hereditary physicians, and pipers. They fought at Bannockburn, Harlaw, Inverkeithing, Killiecrankie, and Culloden.
The book tells the full story: the Lady Rock incident of the 1520s, in which a Maclean chief left his Campbell wife on a tidal skerry to drown; the feud with Clan Campbell that would last a century and end in dispossession; the Campbell strategy of buying up Maclean debts to engineer their ruin through the courts; the surrender of Duart in 1691; two centuries of diaspora that scattered the clan to Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, New South Wales and New Zealand; and the restoration of 1911, when a seventy-six-year-old baronet fulfilled a vow he had made as a boy and brought Duart back to the Macleans.
This revised and expanded second edition has been significantly enhanced following detailed scholarly review by a direct descendant of Hector M r Maclean, twelfth chief of the clan. New material includes:
The Beatons and Rankins - the clan's hereditary physicians and pipers, and their centuries of service to the chiefs of DuartThe Macleans as protectors of Iona from the Scottish Reformation of 1560 until the Campbell takeover of 1691The 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the founding of the first Maclean clan association in North AmericaThe Campbell debt mechanism that engineered the Maclean dispossession - shopkeepers' bills consolidated into a legal instrument of ruinExpanded coverage of the clan diaspora and its legacy across the English-speaking worldNine plates including the Herman Moll map of Mull (1745), the entrance to Duart Castle, portraits of Sir John Maclean, Sir Fitzroy Donald Maclean and Lord Maclean, and Maclean's Cross on IonaA complete index and an appendix listing all recognised septs and chieftains of Clan MacleanWritten in the tradition of Simon Schama's narrative history, What the Stone Remembers is a book for anyone drawn to Scottish history, Highland culture, clan genealogy, and the long memory of stone.
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