Belfast Castle

A castle stood at Béal Feirste by the 1220s, probably to guard the ford across the River Lagan — possibly the work of the Normans who invaded East Ulster in the late twelfth century and centred their earldom on Carrickfergus. It stood in what is now the city centre, between the Farset and Blackstaff rivers; a small settlement is thought to have grown around it by 1333.

Around the end of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth, the castle was seized by a branch of the Uí Néill dynasty, who almost certainly rebuilt it — probably as a Gaelic towerhouse — and kept it as one of the chief residences of their territory of Clann Aedha Buídhe, or Clandeboye. Éinri mac Eoghain Ó Néill, King of Tyrone, took and demolished it in 1476; in 1489 Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill of Tír Chonaill "took and demolished the Castle of Belfast, and then returned safe to his house loaded with immense spoils". The Geraldine Earls of Kildare seized it three times in the early sixteenth century — the 8th Earl sacking Belfast in 1503 and 1512, and his son Gearóid Óg taking it from Aodh Ó Néill, Lord of Clandeboye, in 1523, reporting to Henry VIII: "I brake a castell of his, called Belfast, and burned 24 myle of his country".

In October 1574, during the Enterprise of Ulster, Sir Brian mac Feidhlimidh Ó Néill, Lord of Lower Clandeboye, invited the 1st Earl of Essex to a feast at Belfast Castle to celebrate a newly signed peace with the English Crown. After three days and nights of feasting, Essex's soldiers set upon and killed most of Sir Brian's family and retainers inside the castle — a massacre that seems to have been ordered by Essex, who seized the castle. Sir Brian, his wife and his brother were arrested and, later that year, executed in Dublin.

English forces held the castle during the Nine Years' War, and in June 1597 the men of Shane McBrian O'Neill overpowered its garrison, executing the prisoners they took. Sir John Chichester retook it the following month — reporting that his forces had done so "without anie loss to us, and put those wee found in yt to the sworde" — and placed it under Sir Ralph Lane, once governor of the Roanoke Colony. Chichester was killed that November fighting the MacDonnells at Altfrackyn near Ballycarry, where 180 English soldiers died.

By 1603 the castle lay in ruins. Sir Arthur Chichester — John's brother, one of the most notorious English commanders of the war — offered to rebuild it if granted Belfast and its lands, and by patent of 5 November 1603 the Crown gave him "The Castle of Bealfaste or Belfast". He rebuilt it mainly in brick in the early 1610s, almost certainly on the site of the Uí Néill towerhouse. On 24 April 1708 this Plantation castle accidentally burnt down, killing three sisters and a servant of the 4th Earl of Donegall. It was never rebuilt, and the family left Belfast for almost a century.

The present Belfast Castle stands on a different site. The 3rd Marquess of Donegall, having sold off almost all the family's Belfast estate in the 1850s, kept the Ormeau Demesne and most of Cave Hill — and there, on the old deer park, built a new Scots Baronial residence between 1867 and 1870, calling it Belfast Castle in a nod to family history. The design came from the firm of Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon, though whether Sir Charles Lanyon, W. H. Lynn or John Lanyon drew it is debated. Built of pink Scrabo sandstone with Giffnock dressings on a basalt plinth, it cost well over the £11,000 set aside, forcing Lord Donegall to seek help from his son-in-law, Lord Ashley, to finish it.

On the 3rd Marquess's death in October 1883 the castle passed to his daughter Lady Harriet and her husband Lord Ashley, who succeeded as the 8th Earl of Shaftesbury two years later. Their son, the 9th Earl, held it longest — adding the serpentine Baroque garden staircase in 1894 and serving as Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1907 — but as the family's Ulster estates were broken up under the Land Acts the castle became a financial burden, and in January 1934 he gifted castle and demesne to the City of Belfast.

Housing built along the demesne's Antrim Road edge in the 1950s and 1960s greatly reduced the grounds, leaving the Chapel of the Resurrection and the old Main Gate Lodge marooned among the new estates. The castle itself, a venue for weddings and afternoon teas since 1945, was Grade A listed in 1978 and closed that year for a restoration by Hewitt and Haslam costing over £2 million, reopening on Armistice Day, 11 November 1988.