Hope Castle

The land came to Sir Edward Blayney (1570-1629) by grant in 1607. Blayney was a Welsh soldier from Montgomeryshire, and the grant covered Ballynalurgan and Muckno, where he built a stone defensive castle called Blayney Castle. The town of Castleblayney grew up around that original site. Blayney was created first Baron Blayney in 1621, and his family went on occupying the estate until after the 1830s.

In 1641, in the time of the second baron, the castle was captured by rebels fighting under Hugh Mac Patrick Dubh MacMahon. The baron escaped; his wife and children were captured.

The 7th Baron Blayney sold off part of the land in 1723, and it was not until the 1780s that the present building went up, near the old Elizabethan castle and carrying the same name of Blayney Castle. It was raised for the 11th Baron Blayney (1770-1834), a soldier who rose to lieutenant-general and who owned the land from 1784 to 1834. The architect Robert Woodgate redesigned the house in a Georgian manner in 1799, and in 1832 Baron Blayney employed the landscape architect William Sawrey Gilpin to make improvements to the demesne.

In 1853 Cadwallader, 12th Baron Blayney and the last Lord Blayney, sold the entire Blayney estate to the wealthy Henry Thomas Hope, who substantially renovated the building. The Hopes were a Scottish-Dutch banking family, famous for their ownership of the Hope Diamond, and it was only under their ownership that the house took the name Hope Castle, which it still holds. Hope's widow, Anne Adèle, née Bichat, had the ironwork for the gate lodges, stables and bath houses carried out by the father and son James and Alexander Shekleton in 1862; the stable yards seem to have been built slightly after that, around 1865.

Henry Thomas Hope's daughter Henrietta Adela later inherited the estate. She married in 1861 a husband who then held the courtesy title of Earl of Lincoln and who afterwards succeeded his father as 6th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne. From 1900 to 1904 the house served as a home for Queen Victoria's son Prince Arthur, 1st Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, and his family; the duke was commander of the British Forces in Ireland at that time.

The Hope family left the estate in 1916. The house served as a military barracks during the War of Independence, between 1919 and 1921, and then, for the short span from 1932 to 1937, as the site of Monaghan County Hospital. Beginning in 1942 it was a convent of the Franciscan Order, and remained one until the early 1970s.

After its years as a convent the house was privately owned until Monaghan County Council acquired it in the 1980s. The council renovated the building and demolished the 19th-century additions to the gardens and the main front. It then leased the house to several tenants, the last of them a local businessman, Chris Haren, who held the lease while the place was being run as a small hotel with bar lounges, a restaurant and several guest rooms.

In November 2010 the building was subject to an arson attack. The fire spread in a very short time through the bar and lounge areas, up the stairwells and into the upstairs rooms; the house was uninhabited at the time, but a considerable amount of the hotel's fittings, furniture and antiques was destroyed. It was clear to local Gardaí that trespassers had gained entry to the ground floor, where the fire was started, and it is believed that a local group of teenagers forced their way in and set it deliberately. Gardaí questioned juveniles in the town, but no one was ever convicted. The building, which holds several bedrooms, a bar lounge and a restaurant area, is not in use.