Killyleagh Castle, Killyleagh, County Down

Killyleagh Castle, Killyleagh, County Down

Bence-Jones, Mark. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.

p. 172. “(Clanbrassill, E/DEP; Rowan-Hamilton/IFR; Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Dufferin and Ava, M/PB) Basically a “Plantation Castle,” built by James Hamilton ca 1610; but with two massive round corner-towers, one of them probably surviving from a Norman castle built late C12 by John de Courcy, and the other added 1666 by Henry Hamilton, 2^nd Earl of Clanbrassill; a deliberate and perhaps romantic archaicism which has its counterpart in the romantic castles built in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. 2^nd Earl also built or restored the immense bawn or fortified enclosure between the castle and the town of Killyleagh; which remains as the castle’s most spectacular feature, its high walls still keeping their original battlments and gun-holes. The 2^nd Earl of Clanbrassill appears to have been poisoned by his wife, after she had prevailed on him to make a Will leaving his estates to her instead of to his Hamilton cousins, who were the rightful heirs. The cousins contested the Will and the litigation continued for two generations’ in the end, there was a judgment of Solomon dividing the estates equally between Gawn Hamilton and his cousin Anne, whose share eventually passed by inheritance to the Blackwood family; even Killyleagh Castle being divided, the castle itself going to Gawn and the gatehouse and bawn to Anne. This led to a feud between the two families, who for more than a century confronted each other from opposite ends of the bawn; the Hamiltons in the castle, the Blackwoods in the gatehouse, which they rebuilt as a tall Georgian block. In the early years of C19, when the castle was lived in by the United Irish leader, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, who had returned from his exile in America after being pardoned, it fell into decay, whereas the Blackwoods of the period, , who had become the Lords Dufferin, kept the gatehouse in good order, adding to it 1830; though their principal seat was Clandeboye, at the other side of the county. When 5^th Lord Dufferin (afterwards 1^st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava) came of age, he ended the feud by handing over the gatehouse and bawn to his kinsman at the castle, Archibald Rowan-Hamilton. Being a romantic young man, he demanded in return a quit-rent of a pair of silver spurs and a golden rose in alternate years; which subsequently, having accumulated, were used to adorn his ambassadorial and viceregal dinner tables. As a further gesture, he built a suitably Baronial gatehouse in place of the Georgian house at his own expense; to the desin of the English architect Benjamin Ferrey. To set the seal on the reconciliation, Lord Dufferin married Archibald Rowan-Hamilton’s daughter, Hariot. Almost simultaneously with the rebuilding of the gatehouse, Archibald Rowan-Hamilton – doubtless encouraged by Lord Dufferin’s generosity – employed Charles Lanyon to enlarge, modernise and embellish the castle; the work being carried out between 1847 and 1851. Lanyon extended the castle and gave it a highly romantic skyline of turrets and pointed roofs, so that, in the words of Sir Harold Nicholson, whose mother’s home it was, “it pricks castellated ears above the smoke of its own village and provides a curiously exotic landmark, towering like some chateau of the Loire above the gentle tides of Strangford Lough.” He refaced the walls and added a stupendous Jacobean doorway with strapwork as well as rustications on the columns, incorporating an actual C17 coat-of-arms. And inside he devised a most wonderful Jacobean staircase, with a positive riot of columns and pilasters covered with strapwork, cleverly contrived to give his characteristic feeling of space within the limited confines of the old castle. In order to provide access to the upper floors, there are in fact two staircases in the one space, set at right angles to each other; both being equally massive, with scroll balustrades of oak. Lanyon also decorated the principal reception rooms, giving them fretted ceilings with modillion cornices.”