Gosford Castle

The Achesons were granted land in County Armagh by King James VI and I in 1610, at the start of the Plantation of Ulster. They established the village of Markethill and built a castle there, and that castle was destroyed during the Irish Rebellion of 1641. In its place the family put up a manor house, which they occupied until 1840. Jonathan Swift, who died in 1745, visited Gosford and had a hand in the layout of its gardens.

In 1819 Archibald Acheson, 2nd Earl of Gosford, then head of the family, commissioned the London architect Thomas Hopper to design a new house on the estate. The Norman revival manner chosen for it was Hopper's first attempt at the style he would go on to perfect at Penrhyn Castle in Wales, and he was assisted at Gosford by the local architect Thomas Duff. The building outlasted its patron: it was reported unfinished in 1837, the 2nd Earl died in 1849, and it was not fully complete until 1859, when Hopper's assistant George Adam Burn rebuilt the entrance front. The result is a Grade A listed building, said to be the largest in Ulster.

Archibald Acheson, 4th Earl of Gosford, was forced to sell the castle's contents in 1920, and after his death in April 1922 the Achesons no longer occupied the house. During the Second World War Gosford was commandeered to accommodate troops, with a prisoner-of-war camp on the estate. After the war the family sold up to the Ministry of Agriculture, which established the 240-hectare demesne as Gosford Forest Park. The castle itself was put to work storing public records and, in the 1970s, as a barracks for soldiers. It opened as a hotel in 1983, the venture failed, and the leaseholders let the building fall into disrepair.

The Forest Service regained control of the property in February 2002. The castle was by then in a desperate state of disrepair and, without urgent intervention, in real danger of going irretrievably beyond saving, which brought calls for action from the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society. It was offered for sale with 11 hectares of grounds for as little as one pound, subject to a viable restoration proposal, and in 2006 Gosford Castle Development Ltd bought it for a thousand pounds. Their four-million-pound scheme divided the building vertically into 23 residences while keeping the principal rooms; the first residents moved into the courtyard homes in January 2008, though by 2013 the redevelopment was reported to have been stalled since 2010 over money. The castle stood in for Riverrun, seat of House Tully, in Game of Thrones, and was sold again in 2019 with plans to convert it to apartments.