When you visit the castle you will see a fortress built for defence on a Rock in the sea.

The massive exterior combines six separate buildings, of which you can visit five. The sixth building and the upper floors comprise the administrative and domestic offices of the present Chief and his family.

The castle is situated on an upstanding mass of partly columnar basalt approximately 30 feet in height arising from the shores of Loch Dunvegan. Around it originally the sea ebbed and flowed. Now after centuries of natural deposits of silt, and assisted by the modern needs of supplying an entrance from the land, the sea has receded from that side of the Castle.

The top of the Rock is more-or-less level and forms a roughly oval platform indented on the North-west sector, the long access lying North-west and South-east. This platform measures about 175 feet in length and 110 feet in it's greatest breadth.

The Rock descends all round fairly vertically to the short scree slopes that blanket its base, except in the indent on its North-western quarter, where there is a kind of 'slack' in the cliff, up which a doubly-curved flight of rough stone steps mounts to the Sea-gate. Before the opening of the first landward door in 1748, this was the only entrance to the Castle, and very likely from remotest times there has been an access to the summit of the Rock at this point.

Another important feature which gave Dunvegan Castle and those within its great strength, was the existence of a fresh water well. With this priceless resource added to the impregnability of its position, Dunvegan Castle presented a forbidding obstacle to the enemies of the Chiefs of MacLeod.

Today the Castle has a unified design with Victorian dummy pepper-pots and defensive battlements running the whole length of the roof line. This 'romantic restoration' was carried out by the 25th Chief between 1840 and 1850 to the plans of Robert Brown of Edinburgh at a total cost of £8,000. Underneath this outer skin however there remains a series of complete buildings, each of a different date.

This is why Dunvegan Castle is regarded and held in such high esteem as one of the most important historic castles in Scotland.

As it represents an unbroken line of occupancy over 850 years and throughout this time the building has evolved naturally as the requirement and usage of each generation has manifested itself in the castle changing architecturaly to meet those requirements.

"Any visit to the enchanted Isle of Skye must be deemed incomplete without savouring the wealth of history offered by Dunvegan Castle"