Qualla: Inchcailloch

Inchcailloch: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name comes first. Inchcailloch - innis-na-cailliche in older Gaelic - means 'island of the cowled woman' or, more plainly, 'island of the old woman'. The woman in question was Saint Kentigerna, an Irish princess turned hermit, who left her homeland in the eighth century to preach Christianity in Scotland and is said to have settled, prayed, and died here on this small wooded island in Loch Lomond. The ruins of an old chapel and a burial ground in her name once stood somewhere on the island, though no certain trace of either survives. What does survive is the name, attached to an 85-metre-high oak-covered ridge that rises out of the loch's southern basin near the village of Balmaha.

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Image: Colin Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Inchcailloch: Sitting on the Fault Line

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JoachimKohler-HB, CC BY-SA 4.0. Inchcailloch is geologically theatrical. The island sits directly on the Highland Boundary Fault - the great geological seam where the lowland sandstones of central Scotland meet the metamorphic schists and quartzites of the Highlands proper. Stand on the island's ridge and you a...

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Image: JoachimKohler-HB | CC BY-SA 4.0

Inchcailloch: Robert the Bruce's Hunting Forest

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sandy Gemmill, CC BY-SA 2.0. The island's recorded human use goes back at least to the early fourteenth century, when it was used as a hunting forest during the reign of Robert the Bruce. The crossing from Balmaha to the island is shallow enough that deer can ford it, and red deer still swim across to graze ...

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Image: Sandy Gemmill | CC BY-SA 2.0

Inchcailloch: Clan MacGregor's Sacred Ground

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. For Clan MacGregor - the broken, persecuted clan whose surname was for a century made illegal under Scottish law - Inchcailloch was sacred ground. The travel writer H.V. Morton visited in the 1930s and recorded the tradition: 'The isle is sacred to the MacGregors, and in the tang...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Inchcailloch: The Lady of the Lake

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walter Scott put Inchcailloch into national literature. In his long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, published in 1810, the island appears under its older Gaelic spelling as the place where the yew trees grow whose wood is used to make a slender crosslet - the fiery cross sum...

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Image: HARTLEPOOLMARINA2014 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Inchcailloch: A Reserve in the Reserve

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Inchcailloch is part of the Loch Lomond National Nature Reserve. Visitors can take a small ferry from Balmaha across the shallow strait, walk the nature trail that loops around the wooded ridge, and visit the old burial ground. The oak woodland is one of the surviving fragm...

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Image: Colin | CC BY-SA 4.0