Faslane Castle, Shandon Castle, and St Michael's Chapel

Three ruined castles and a ruined chapel stand along the Gareloch in Argyll and Bute. Faslane Castle once overlooked the loch from a green mound between two glens, while Shandon Castle sat on a hillside above the modern house of Shandon. St Michael’s Chapel, a small mediaeval building, stands near the vanished castle sites within a modern cemetery. The castles belonged to the mormaers of Lennox in the Middle Ages. Walter of Faslane became mormaer in the early 13th century through marriage to Margaret, daughter of Domhnall. Faslane appears in Blind Harry’s 15th-century poem The Wallace, where William Wallace is welcomed by Mormaer Maol Choluim I. By the 18th century the last MacAulay chief still found shelter in the ruins. Shandon Castle’s remains were known in the 19th century as ‘the old Dun’, though no local tales survived. Visitors today see only grassy mounds and a few standing gables. St Michael’s Chapel shows two gable ends and rebuilt walls about a metre high. A spring called the Priest’s Well once flowed beneath the bank, and the foundations of a priest’s house could still be traced in the 19th century. The chapel site lies inside a modern cemetery, close to the railway line that buried Faslane Castle’s last traces in the 1890s.