Ardencaple ("cape of the horses", "Height of the Horses"), the ancestral home of the Clan MacAulay lay on the eastern shore of the entrance to the Gare Loch just a mile from the centre of Helensburgh in Scotland. Although once a magnificent building all that remains is a single tower.
In 1923, Mrs H MacAulay-Stromberg bought the Castle from Sir Iain Colquhoun and at last the Castle returned to MacAulay ownership. Under her loving care the Castle and grounds were brought back into good order.
Mrs MacAulay-Stromberg invited Edward Wells to write a history of the MacAulays, resulting in a handsome book "Ardencaple Castle and its Lairds". Mrs MacAulay died in 1931 and the Castle. faced a long period of neglect.
During the Second World War it was, used by the Admiralty as Naval Married Quarters and finally demolished in 1957 to make room for a Naval Housing Estate as the Submarine Base on Gareloch developed. Unable to raise funds at a Local or National level local people could only watch in distress as the Castle came down.
Not all of the castle was destroyed. There remains one tower, useful to the Navy as a navigational beacon in the past, but now redundant for that purpose, standing sweetly on the headland, protected as a listed building, the only visible symbol of the MacAulay Clan's existence in Ardencaple.
The name of Ardencaple (pronounced Arngappil) appears in a document of 1294. In time, the land of the lairds of Ardencaple extended from Garelochhead to Cardross and across to Glen Fruin. The first to use the surname of MacAulay in documents was the 11th Laird, Walter of Ardencaple, who inherited the Estate in 1554. Walter's son Aulay was knighted by King James.
In 1608 Sir Aulay MacAulay represented the County of Dumbarton in the Scots Parliament. He was one of two Commissioners appointed to regulate the price of boots and shoes, and his coat-of-arms indicates this. The fortunes of the MacAulays slowly declined and the land and Castle passed to the Duke of Argyll and through him to Lord John Campbell, and then to Sir James Colquhoun.
In the 1740s, Archibald MacAulay, Laird of Ardencaple, had to sell off a portion of his estate, though by the early 1750s the roof had fallen in and the overall condition of the castle had deteriorated to such an extent that the next Laird was forced to abandon his residence there and live in nearby Laggarie. In about 1767, the 12th chief, Aulay MacAulay of Ardencaple, died at High Laggarie (now within the present village of Rhu).