Campbeltown is a town and former royal burgh in Argyll and Bute, Scotland, located by Campbeltown Loch on the Kintyre peninsula. Originally known as Kinlochkilkerran (Eng: The head of the loch by the kirk of St. Kieran) - this form is still used in Gaelic. It was renamed in the 17th century as 'Campbell's town', Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyle, having been granted the site in 1667 for the erection of a burgh of barony. Campbeltown became an important centre for shipbuilding and Scotch whisky, and a busy fishing port.
Campbeltown is traditionally one of the few communities in the Scottish Highlands where the Scots language has predominated, rather than the previously widespread Scottish Gaelic. This was due to the plantation of lowland merchants to the burgh in the Middle Ages. Today the English language, in the form of the Scottish English dialect, is the predominant language in the town.
Campbeltown Airport (IATA: CAL, ICAO: EGEC) is located at Machrihanish, 3 NM (5.6 km; 3.5 mi) west of Campbeltown, near the tip of the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll and Bute on the west coast of Scotland. It is still owned by the Ministry of Defence, under a 'care and maintenance' programme, but a part of the airfield is now run as a commercial enterprise by the Highlands and Islands Airports Limited, a company under the control of the Scottish Government.
The airport was formerly known as RAF Machrihanish (after the village of Machrihanish) and hosted squadrons of the Royal Air Force and other NATO air forces as well as the United States Marine Corps. It is now called MoD Machrihanish. The airport is at a strategic point over the Irish Sea, and was used to guard the entrance to the Firth of Clyde where US nuclear submarines were based at Holy Loch and where Royal Navy Trident missile submarines are still based at HMNB Clyde (Faslane Naval Base).
Permanent full time military operations ceased in 1997.
