Ashford Castle, County Mayo

The first castle at Ashford was built in 1228 on the perimeter of a monastic site, raised by the Anglo-Norman House of Burke on the Galway shore of Lough Corrib near Cong. The de Burgos held it for more than three and a half centuries, their surname settling over that span into Burke, or Bourke.

The end of that tenure came in a battle between the de Burgos and Sir Richard Bingham, the English Lord President of Connaught. In 1589 the castle fell to Bingham, who then added a fortified enclave within its precincts.

Dominick Browne, of the family that became Barons Oranmore and Browne, received the estate by Royal Grant in the 1670s. In 1715 the Brownes formally established the Ashford estate and built a hunting lodge in the style of a 17th-century French château. The double-headed eagles on the roof are from the Browne arms.

Into the early 19th, Thomas Elwood served as the Brownes' agent at Ashford and was recorded as living there in 1814.

Sir Benjamin Guinness bought Ashford in 1852 from Dominick Browne, 1st Baron Oranmore and Browne, through the Encumbered Estates' Court. He added two large Victorian extensions to the castle and pushed the estate out to 26,000 acres, laying new roads and planting thousands of trees.

The house next door belonged to Sir William Wilde, whose son Oscar spent much of his childhood on that adjoining estate. An engraving of Ashford appeared in Sir William's book on Lough Corrib.

Benjamin Guinness died in 1868 and the estate passed to his son Arthur Guinness, 1st Baron Ardilaun, who carried the building further in the neo-Gothic. James Franklin Fuller and George Ashlin designed a complete rebuilding of the west wing, tying the early 18th-century block in the east to two de Burgo-era towers in the west; battlements were then run around the whole castle. Ennobled in 1880, Ardilaun took his title from the island of Ardilaun on Lough Corrib, which formed part of the estate.

He planted heavily across the demesne and subsidised steamboats on the lough — the Lady Eglinton among them — running between the villages of the upper Corrib and Galway city. Not everything held: the Cong Canal, cut to link Lough Mask with Lough Corrib, could not hold water and was known as the Dry Canal. The Land Wars of the late 19th century ran close by — Captain Charles Boycott's tenants at Lough Mask House were the neighbouring case — but Ardilaun kept a reputation as an improving landlord.

Ashford went to Ardilaun's nephew Ernest Guinness and was sold in 1939 to Noel Huggard, who opened the estate as a hotel known for its country pursuits, angling and shooting among them; Huggard's parents had been in the hotel trade at Waterville, County Kerry, since 1910. In 1951 John Ford brought The Quiet Man to the west of Ireland, and the castle grounds and nearby Cong carried much of the film's action. The guest list over the years ran from the Prince of Wales, later George V, and his wife the future Queen Mary to Ronald Reagan, John Lennon and Prince Rainier III of Monaco with his wife Grace Kelly.

John Mulcahy bought the castle in 1970, oversaw a complete restoration and doubled its size with a new wing in the early 1970s, adding a golf course. A group of Irish American investors including Chuck Feeney and Tony O'Reilly took it on in 1985 and sold it in 2007 for €50 million to the Galway property investor Gerry Barrett. Bank of Scotland (Ireland), which had financed the purchase, placed the property in receivership in November 2011, though the hotel traded on under the Tifco Hotel Group and, according to the receiver, remained profitable throughout.

Two months before that receivership, the estate fell into a dispute over the ground itself. In September 2011 Barrett had electric gates installed and shut across a centuries-old public right of way over a bridge near the castle, a route used daily by families living on the estate and by local residents. A letter to castle management went unanswered; about 150 locals protested, joined by councillors and Éamon Ó Cuív, T.D., after Barrett had attempted to block the demonstration with a High Court injunction. A local landowner's case against the obstruction of the right of way was heard that December. Red Carnation Hotels bought Ashford in May 2013 for €20 million and closed it for refurbishment — all 820 windows replaced, a new lead roof laid, the stonework repointed — reopening in April 2015.