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Battlements dilemma in historic Highland castle restoration

Work being carried out on Mingary Castle
Work being carried out on Mingary Castle

An historic Highland castle that is being restored as a holiday retreat for the rich and famous is to have irregular battlements because it is unclear how they would originally have looked.

Mingary Castle, which has been unoccupied for more than 150 years, is a well-known landmark on the most westerly point of the British mainland.

And work is now well under way on the £2.3million project that will turn into luxury accommodation for wealthy pop stars, actors and other celebrities, as they are the only ones likely to be able to afford the rental charges.

Builders restoring the 13th century castle that stands near Kilchoan on the Ardnamurchan peninsula are currently levelling off the tops of each of the crenellations at the height of the highest remaining stones – even though this may not have been how they looked when first erected.

Rebuilding the walls has been a massive task and they estimate that they have had to manually carry around 60 tonnes of rock and mortar up the scaffolding to complete the work.

Local historian Jon Haylett said: “The recent run of warm, dry days gave the builders a chance to get on with the process of topping off the curtain walls.

“The problem with the tops of the walls was that they were ragged from loss of stone.

“One solution would have been to have pointed up the ragged edges and left them. At the other extreme, with advice from the archaeologists, it would have been possible to recreate the crenellations, which appear to have been fairly regular.

“The compromise that has been adopted has been to level off the tops of the walls with the highest points of the ragged edges so we’ve ended up with what might best be described as irregular crenellations.”

He praised the quality of the workmanship that has gone into restoring and rebuilding the castle walls, adding that every piece of rock and all the mortar had to be carried up manually.

Mr Haylett said one of the builders estimated that it weighed a total of around 60 tonnes.

Castle owner Donald Houston, of Ardnamurchan Estate, gained planning permission for the Mingary Preservation Trust to turn the Seat of Clan MacIain into a residential property.

He previously explained that turning the historic building into a holiday let was the best way to ensure that it could be self-financing and to prevent it falling back into a state of disrepair.

The trust launched an appeal to help finance the work and, so far, it has received donations of just over £250,000.

Anyone wishing to donate to the project can do so at www.mingarycastletrust.co.uk