The coat of arms of Inveraray shows a fishing net cast over the sea, with five herrings tangled in its meshes, and a Latin motto that translates roughly as may a herring always hang to thee. The herald Arthur Fox-Davies, writing in 1909, called it about the most remarkable coat of arms I have ever come across. Most town arms try to be dignified. Inveraray's tells you, with admirable honesty, what the town was for. Set at the head of Loch Fyne, Scotland's longest sea loch, the town was rebuilt in the eighteenth century around a fishing pier, a clan castle, and the conviction of a single duke that an entire town could be planned, built, and named into existence at once.
The original Inveraray sat at the estuary of the River Aray, where a Highland trading route met deep water. The town grew up under the first Inveraray Castle, home of the Earls of Argyll from the early fifteenth century. In 1474, the 1st Earl persuaded King James III to grant Inveraray status as a burgh of barony, with a Saturday market and two annual fairs: the feast of Saint Brendan on 16 May and the feast of the Archangel Michael on 29 September. In 1648, Charles I incorporated it as a Royal Burgh. Then in 1747, the architect William Adam drew up plans for a wholly new town, and by 1770 the 5th Duke of Argyll had set the rebuilding in motion. Robert Mylne, born in Edinburgh in 1733, designed and built most of the new town between 1772 and 1800, including the church. John Adam contributed buildings as well, among them the inn on Front Street. The old town was, in effect, demolished and replaced.
The new town came after decades of violence the Campbells could not always control. During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Marquess of Montrose led a Royalist army into Argyll in late 1644. His forces burned and sacked Inveraray and the surrounding territory through December and into January 1645. Montrose left on 14 January and marched north to fight at the Battle of Inverlochy on 2 February. The Campbells did not forget. Royal connections to the family deepened over the centuries: in 1871 Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, married the Marquess of Lorne, heir to the Campbell chieftainship, formalising an aristocratic relationship between the Argyll family and the royal house. Inveraray Castle has been the seat of the Duke of Argyll and the chief of Clan Campbell since the eighteenth century. The current Duke is Torquhil Campbell, the 13th.
Two structures lift Inveraray's skyline above the white-painted Georgian terraces. The Bell Tower, just southwest of All Saints' Episcopal Church, was raised as a memorial to Campbells who died in the First World War and earlier conflicts; it contains the second-heaviest ring of ten bells in the world. The tower is open to the public, and the bells are rung regularly. High on the hillside behind the town, the Dun na Cuaiche folly, built between 1747 and 1748 by William Douglas at a contract price of 46 pounds for the mason work, sits as a deliberate ruined watchtower commissioned by the 3rd Duke. From its viewpoint the whole sweep of Loch Fyne unfolds. Closer to ground level, the Mercat Cross, dated to the fifteenth century, was moved from the old town and now stands at the seafront end of Main Street.
During the Second World War, the Combined Operations Training Centre near Inveraray became one of the most important amphibious-assault training facilities in Britain. Between 1940 and 1944 roughly 250,000 allied soldiers passed through, practising landings on enemy-occupied beaches. The instruction here fed directly into many operations, including D-Day. In more recent years the town has gone on a different kind of mission: as a filming location. Inveraray and Inveraray Castle were used for the second season of the Netflix series The Diplomat, and the town doubled for a fictional Scottish village in Loch Henry, the second episode of the sixth season of Black Mirror. The journalist Neil Munro, best known for his Para Handy Tales about the Clyde puffers, was born here in 1863, and Robert Burns memorialised an unhappy visit in his sour 1787 poem Written at Inverary. The Inveraray Jail is now a museum. The herring pier is now a quiet place to look at the loch.
Inveraray sits at approximately 56.231 north, 5.073 west, on the western shore of Loch Fyne, near the head of the loch. From altitude the planned town reads as an unusually orderly grid of white buildings on the shoreline, with Inveraray Castle prominent just to the north and the bell tower rising distinctly from the western edge of town. EGPF Glasgow lies about 45 nautical miles east-southeast; EGPK Prestwick is roughly 60 nautical miles south-southeast. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 5,000 feet to take in town, castle, and loch in one view. Argyll Forest Park rises east of Loch Fyne; weather is reliably wet, with low cloud common over the hills.