Shakespeare made MacBeth's Highland stronghold one of the most notorious in the world.
Although the ancient castle has long gone, Inverness still has as an incredible legacy - the murder spot that Shakespeare immortalised as the place where the 11th century general killed his monarch King Duncan, so many claim.
As tourist interest in ''heritage holidays'' increases, this site might one day become a centrepiece of one of the north's greatest tourist attractions.
For the opportunity is there to exploit the MacBeth story as an international tourist-puller.
Shakespeare's MacBeth, written nearly 400 years ago is universally accepted as one of his great tragedies and rated alongside Hamlet, King Lear and Julius Caesar.
Millions must know the MacBeth script from their schooldays - his meeting with the witches offering him a false promise and the persuasions of the vengeful Lady MacBeth.
Admittedly, clues to the exact spot are few, but tradition and geography clearly dictate that MacBeth's fortress was on Auld Castlehill giving its name to the Inverness town area now known as The Crown. Auldcastle Road itself is another helpful location aid, so too a charter dated 1362 which a prominent Inverness lawyer, John Anderson uncovered much later and quoted to the Society of Antiquarians in a lecture delivered more than 160 years ago.
The charter records a landowner's grant to the Roman Catholic Church of ''lands within the old castle of Inverness''. Those are still known as Diriebught (the poor's lands) which skirts the base of The Crown and formed the perimeter of the MacBeth stronghold.
In his lecture, according to the society's own minutes, Mr Anderson reasoned that MacBeth's castle must have been at the eastern extremity of The Crown hill for good reasons, one being that it afforded the clearest and widest possible views over the surrounding land and sea, essential in those troubled times.
Mr Anderson's well argued case appears to have been given scant attention by the historians, perhaps because they considered one Inverness Castle was enough to research.
Indeed, Mr Anderson suggests that confusing MacBeth's castle with the Inverness Castle site beside the River Ness had long been a prevalent notion. Mr Anderson starts by offering some convincing evidence.''The town is situated on a plain, at a short distance from the junction of the River Ness with the Moray Firth.'' The range of mountains extending northwards from Loch Ness gradually falls in elevation as it approaches the town, which is environed on the south by rising ground of inconsiderable height.
''At its western extremity, this ridge towers abruptly over the river, which half a mile further down, terminates its course. From this precipitous brow, a line of low lying hills runs eastward, immediately above the high road, broken occasionally by small lateral glens.''
The first of these occurs about four furlongs to the eastward of Inverness at the foot of the Crown Hill, which forms the eastern, as the mount above the river does the western, point of the whole eminence; and it is through part of the latter that the approach to Fort Augustus, now called Castle Street, has been cut.
''From its commanding position over the narrow strait which separates Inverness from Ross, this eminence must at all times have been the object of great importance; and appears, from the remotest era, to have been crowned by a fortress.''
Mr Anderson suggests that centuries before MacBeth, the Pictish King Brudi (Brude) would have had his stronghold on either of those extremities.
He accepts just where the Pictish monarch had his fortress is vague but that there is evidence where MacBeth's castle was located. Explains Mr Anderson, in an old manuscript in the archives of the Antiquarians of Scotland, relative to the old family of Cuthbert, which bears a date of 1635, one passage reads: ''In all their charters and old wryts, they are called the Cuthberts of the Alde Castlehill; this castle now in being then the new castle; and it was founded by King Eugenius the Second. There is yet some vestiges of their old castle to be seen.'' What remains these were is not specified.
Today, around Auldcastle Hill there is no display board or direction sign indicating where the legendary MacBeth held court and, if we accept Shakespeare's telescoped history, where he fatally wounded King Duncan.
The absence of on-site information puzzles holiday motorists and tourist coach parties which stop in Auldcastle Road. The more curious walk along the row of bungalows and the grassy bank of trees that masks the panoramic views then depart, none the wiser.
Nor have historians helped, having dismissed MacBeth's old keep as some crude timbered earthwork, near-impossible to locate with any precision.
A convenient assumption, but one which could be very wrong.
Who can presume that as most Highland families settled for basic dwellings, MacBeth would have shared such a lack of ambition.
MacBeth travelled across Europe in 1050 and must have been impressed by the great temples and other examples of sophisticated architecture he viewed on visits to Rome for a papal audience. And since there is no contradictory evidence, one can assert with impunity that on his return from Rome, MacBeth built a stone castle befitting his rank as High King of Alba, providing himself, his queen and court with some of the comforts of that advanced lifestyle he would have sampled as the guest of the Bishop of Rome.
But prospects of a MacBeth tourist promotion cannot be rated as having more than a pious hope of becoming a reality, given past efforts to promote sites of interest in the town.