What were initially the physical features protecting Argyll by making access difficult – Loch Fyne, Loch Awe, the Great Glen – eventually became communication routes. With this development, secular power gradually passed from Argyll south-eastwards to central Scotland.

Argyll remained at he heart of Celtic Christianity in Scotland though, until the end of the eleventh century when Roman Catholicism became the dominant religious force.

The relative independence of the Lordship of the Isles presented a constant challenge to the authority of the Scottish crown. Then the MacDougalls - descended from Dugall, son of Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles - backed the wrong side by fighting against Robert the Bruce in the Wars of Independence in the fourteenth century.

They lost their lands and saw them granted as a reward to the faithful if relatively minor clan, the Campbells of Lochawe. Argyll, in time, became a Campbell dukedom and a considerable part of it remains within the present-day Campbell’s Argyll estates. It is sometimes argued that the dominance of the Campbell clan saved the area from the worst of the fights for supremacy between local clans which ravaged most of the rest of Scotland.

Argyll’s experience of these conflicts however, was devastating enough for the area to have to be repopulated twice in the mid-seventeenth century by gaelic-speakers from the lowlands of Ayrshire.

The two Jacobite rebellions in the eighteenth century (1715 and 1745) led to the opening up of the Highlands, including Argyll. The Highlanders’ advantage in territory accessible only by the cattle drovers’ routes was soon eroded by the efforts of General George Wade. He was sent north to engineer and supervise the building of roads to allow the swift movement of troops. His success was formidable. Ordinance Survey maps of many areas of the Highlands today carry his name against roads and bridges in still less-than-accessible places. Indeed, as you drive on the A83 from Ardgartan on Loch Long through to Inveraray on Loch Fyne, you will see Wade’s old road below you. Its final climb makes sense of the name given to the top of the mountain pass - Rest and be Thankful.

One might say that the silver lining was the general access subsequently provided by these roads for Highlanders and visitors alike – but the fact of Culloden and the notion of a silver lining are impossible bedfellows.