Qualla: Loch Awe

Loch Awe: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick Mackie, CC BY-SA 2.0. Twenty-six miles long and barely a mile wide. Loch Awe runs like a knife cut between two parallel sea lochs - Loch Etive to the north, Loch Fyne to the south - and at its head the bulk of Ben Cruachan rises three and a half thousand feet straight out of the water. Inside that mountain, in a cathedral-sized cavern hollowed from the granite, four turbines spin: a pumped-storage power station that can deliver 440 megawatts in under two minutes. Outside, on a low island at the far north tip of the loch, the burned-out walls of Kilchurn Castle are reflected in some of the most photographed water in Scotland. Robert the Bruce won a battle here in 1308 that broke the Clan MacDougall. The loch keeps a lot of stories.

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Image: Patrick Mackie | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Awe: The Long Loch

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Snapshots Of The Past, CC BY-SA 2.0. Loch Awe is Scotland's third-largest freshwater loch by surface area - 38.5 square kilometres - and its longest by length, stretching 41 kilometres from the head at Kilchurn to the Ford end. The water drains north-west through the River Awe and the Pass of Brander into the salt w...

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Image: Snapshots Of The Past | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Awe: Robert The Bruce And The MacDougalls

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johnny Durnan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Loch Awe was Clan MacDougall country, with Macarthurs, MacGregors, Campbells, and Stewarts living in close proximity around its shores. After Bannockburn was still six years off, Robert the Bruce came west to settle accounts with the MacDougalls of Lorn, who had backed John Comyn...

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Image: Johnny Durnan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Awe: Kilchurn Castle

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick Mackie, CC BY-SA 2.0. The castle that gets photographed sits at the north end on a small island that becomes a peninsula when the water is low. Kilchurn was built by Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy in the 15th century, expanded into a barracks for two hundred troops by 1693, and abandoned after lightn...

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Image: Patrick Mackie | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Awe: The Hollow Mountain

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two hydroelectric facilities draw power from Loch Awe. The conventional Inverawe power station, built in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, dams the River Awe at the Awe Barrage in the Pass of Brander and feeds water through a submerged ...

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Loch Awe: Lochawe Village And St Conan's Kirk

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0. At the north tip, where the railway crosses, sits the small village of Lochawe - confusingly spelt as one word, while the train station is two. The village grew up around the Loch Awe Hotel of 1871 and the railway station opened in 1880 when the Callander and Oban Railway pushed ...

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 4.0