King Fergus' Isle (5)
Previous to the lowering of the water level, it was reported that &quot;the door is placed on the top of an almost vertical rock which one can only reach with difficulty (and presumably directly from a boat).  Provision had been made for barring the door with a log let into sockets in the rock at each side.”  Also on the island heavy mortised beams were found “all in the close vicinity of the castle ruins” (which I interpret as meaning on the lake bed, rather than on the island), which were thought to have come from either “a destroyed pier or the remains of the castle.&quot;  One heavy beam of black wood, &quot;was about one foot square in cross-section and 20-30 feet long, with recesses cut in the end and round holes at intervals of about a foot apart.”  A section of carved pine was also found on the lake bed, thought to have been part of a screen or an upper panel of a cupboard door, but thought to only date from about 1500.

At first sight, it must be said, that the masonry does not look terribly convincing.  It reminds me of a folly, made to look like a castle, but I doubt anyone would have gone to the trouble of building a folly out here, where it would seldom be seen.  That would have been folly!  The 'unconvincing' impression is contributed to by the doorway, which is roughly built using rubble rather than ashlar - but then again, it would have been unlikely that anyone would have brought dressed stone to a remote island in the middle of a Highland loch in deepest darkest Badenoch.  It would have taken so long to cart it here, it probably still wouldn't have arrived!

Having said all that however, I suspect that the wall in the centre of the photo is not actually the tower at all.  The more ruinous masonry to the left of it looks much more like a tower - it appears older and thicker, and if you look back to the previous photo, there appear to be two parallel walls - the long side walls of a tower (with two very large pine trees growing between them).
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