Locals long believed that, in prehistoric times, a broch or dun called Dun David - Dun Dhaibhidh in Gaelic - stood on this headland. The position invites it: a sheer drop to the sea on three sides, a clear sightline up and down the coast, water at the foot of the cliff. No archaeological evidence has been found to confirm the earlier fort, but the name has the ring of memory rather than invention. The Iron Age peoples who built brochs all along the Atlantic coast of Scotland would have found Duntulm an obvious place to fortify. Whoever first piled stones here was reading the landscape the same way the medieval chiefs would: from this rock, you control the sea road.

The medieval castle was built in the 14th and 15th centuries, when northern Skye was being torn between two clans. The MacLeods held Trotternish from their seat at Dunvegan in the west. The Macdonalds, descendants of the Lords of the Isles, pushed up from the south. Trotternish changed hands repeatedly, sometimes after pitched battles, sometimes after the slower violence of legal manoeuvre at Edinburgh. Defences at Duntulm were improved in the 16th century, but the real shift came in the early 17th: by then the MacDonalds of Sleat had gained the upper hand in the area. In 1618 the Privy Council and Sir Donald MacDonald of Sleat - 'Donald Gorm Og,' the 9th chief - signed a charter requiring him to repair Duntulm and live there fittingly as a chief should.

By the early 18th century, the MacDonalds had moved their main seat south to Monkstadt and then to Armadale, on the more sheltered Sleat peninsula at the southern end of Skye. Duntulm was abandoned. Like many highland castles unroofed by their owners, it began to dissolve back into the cliff it stood on. Local legend claims a piper's tunes still echo from the dungeons; a nurse is said to have dropped the chief's baby from a window into the sea. The truths beneath the stories are harder to recover. What survives is the placement - dramatic, exposed, calculated - and the long shadow it casts in clan history. Duntulm is a scheduled monument now: protected, mapped, and slowly weathering toward whatever comes next.