Antrim Castle

Antrim Castle, also called Massereene Castle, was a fortified mansion on the banks of the Sixmilewater River at Antrim, built in stages between 1613 and 1662. The first house was raised in 1613 by an English settler, Sir Hugh Clotworthy, and enlarged in 1662 by his son John Clotworthy, 1st Viscount Massereene. It was through John's daughter and heiress Mary, and her marriage to Sir John Skeffington, 4th Baronet — who by special remainder became 2nd Viscount Massereene — that the estate and the title passed to the Skeffingtons.

In March 1689 the Jacobite general Richard Hamilton and his men raided the castle and carried off Viscount Massereene's silver plate, other silverware and furniture to a value of £3,000 — a considerable loss at the time.

For a time the castle was used for political conferences: in 1806 the Rt Hon. John Foster, the last Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was reported to have spoken at a meeting in its Oak Room. In 1813 the house was rebuilt to designs by the Dublin architect John Bowden as a three-storey Georgian-Gothic castellated mansion, with round-angle turrets at the corners; the Restoration-style doorway of the original castle, carrying heraldry and a head of Charles I, was re-erected as the centrepiece of the entrance front. A tall hexagonal turret of ashlar was added in 1887 when the castle was enlarged again. The demesne also had a 17th-century formal garden, described as unique in Ulster, with a long canal crossed at right angles by a second to form a T, and the motte of a Norman castle; Jacobean-Revival outbuildings of coursed rubble basalt with sandstone dressings went up around 1840.

At three in the morning on 28 October 1922, after a small family gathering, the castle caught fire and was destroyed. Much of the evidence pointed to arson by the IRA, but the official verdict was not conclusive, and no insurance claim was paid out. The shell stood as a ruin until it was demolished in 1970.

The demesne outlived the house. The stable block was converted into a family residence and renamed Clotworthy House; Antrim Borough Council acquired it and opened it as an arts centre in 1982, which ran until 2009, when the building was revamped as a conference centre. The formal gardens became the subject of a £6m restoration project by the council, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and remain a visitor attraction on the Randalstown Road.

In December 2022 the Antrim historian Stephen McCracken published definitive evidence that the castle had been destroyed by the IRA, drawing on testimonies preserved in the National Archives of Ireland, chiefly that of Kevin Sheils and of another IRA commander named Fitzpatrick.