Qualla: Moy Castle

Moy Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Fergusson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The walls still rise to gable height. The crenellated parapet is mostly intact. A ground-floor well still holds water. What is missing is the roof, which has been gone for nearly three hundred years, and most of the people who once knew this building from the inside, who have been gone almost as long. Moy Castle stands above Lochbuie on the southern coast of Mull, a three-storey tower house of stone built in the early fifteenth century. It is a scheduled monument now, which means the law protects what remains. Between 2006 and 2015 conservation engineers stabilised the masonry; further work continues. A castle that was abandoned in 1752 is, by 2026, more carefully looked after than at any time since the Macleans left.

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Image: Dave Fergusson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moy Castle: The Charter and the Brothers

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Moore, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two Maclean brothers built the empire that produced Moy Castle. Lachlan Lubanach Maclean took Duart on Mull's east coast. His brother Hector Reaganach Maclean received the lands at Lochbuie, granted to him in 1360. The construction of Moy Castle probably began under John Maclean,...

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Image: Peter Moore | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moy Castle: Tower House Architecture

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Dorrell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Moy is a tower house, the dominant defensive form of late-medieval Scotland. The plan is compact: three storeys and an attic, contained within walls thick enough to absorb most direct attack. Most of the surviving stonework dates to the early fifteenth century, with later alterat...

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Image: Richard Dorrell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moy Castle: Captured and Returned

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David P Howard, CC BY-SA 2.0. The castle was taken at least once by Clan Campbell, the rising power of the western Highlands, before being returned to the Macleans. The seventeenth century brought the Campbells repeated dominance over their Maclean neighbours, both militarily and through legal acquisition of ...

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Image: David P Howard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Moy Castle: I Know Where I'm Going

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fred Howard, CC BY-SA 2.0. Moy Castle appears in the 1945 Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I'm Going!, where it serves as the supposedly cursed castle that the heroine cannot enter until she has matured emotionally. The film's directors, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, used Mull and the Soun...

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Image: Fred Howard | CC BY-SA 2.0