Dunluce Castle

Dunluce — Dún Libhse — sits on the edge of a basalt outcrop in County Antrim between Portballintrae and Portrush, cut off from the mainland by extremely steep drops on either side and reached now by a bridge. An early Irish fort once stood on the rock, and those same drops may have been part of what drew the early Christians and Vikings who came to the place. The first castle was raised in the 13th century by Richard Óg de Burgh, 2nd Earl of Ulster.

The oldest surviving work belongs to somebody else. Two large drum towers on the eastern side, about 9 metres across, are relics of a stronghold built by the McQuillans after they became lords of the Route — a lordship they held from the late 13th century, though the family is not documented in possession of Dunluce itself until 1513. They lost it in the end to force of arms: the MacDonnells displaced them after beating them in two major battles across the middle and later 16th century.

The family that took Dunluce brought a Scottish pedigree with it. The castle became the home of the chief of the Clan MacDonnell of Antrim and the Clan MacDonald of Dunnyveg, a line running back to John Mor MacDonald, second son of Good John of Islay, Lord of the Isles and 6th chief of Clan Donald in Scotland, born of John's second marriage to Princess Margaret Stewart, daughter of King Robert II of Scotland.

In 1584, on the death of James MacDonald, 6th chief of the Clan MacDonald of Antrim and Dunnyveg, one of his younger brothers seized the Antrim Glens. Sorley Boy MacDonnell took Dunluce with them, kept it for himself and improved it in the Scottish style. He swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I, and his son Randal was made 1st Earl of Antrim by King James I.

Four years after Sorley Boy took the castle, the Girona, a galleass of the Spanish Armada, was wrecked in a storm on the rocks nearby. The wreck armed and paid for the place at once: her cannon were installed in the gatehouses, the rest of her cargo was sold, and the funds went into restoring the castle. A MacDonnell granddaughter, Rose, was born in the castle in 1613.

Around 1608 Randall MacDonnell, 1st Earl of Antrim, laid out a town beside his castle, before the official Plantation of Ulster had begun. It may have held the most revolutionary housing in Europe when it was built, with indoor toilets — then only starting to be introduced around Europe — and a complex street network based on a grid. The Irish uprising of 1641 razed it to the ground, and it stayed lost until major excavations in 2011 found significant remains. As of that season, ninety-five per cent of the town was still to be discovered.

Dunluce served as the seat of the Earl of Antrim, and Randal McDonnell and his wife Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham, bought lavish furnishings for it. What emptied it was money rather than gunpowder: the MacDonnells were impoverished following the Battle of the Boyne, and the castle was abandoned in 1690. It has deteriorated ever since, with parts scavenged as material for nearby buildings. The ruin is a monument in state care, looked after by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, and the earthworks beside it are separately scheduled.