Killiney Castle

The land on which the house stands was reputedly under the control of the Talbots of Malahide as far back as the 13th century. The building itself dates from 1740, when Colonel John Malpas raised Mount Malpas, a Georgian mansion of two storeys over a basement set in 150 acres walled in stone except on the seaward side, "where nature had sufficiently enclosed them". An advertisement in Falkiner's Dublin Journal of 1752 suggests Malpas may have rented the place out in its early years: it offered "Roxborough, formerly called Mount Malpas, containing 150 acres of land enclosed by a stone wall and a new well-furnished house of six rooms and two large closets on a floor with offices".

By the middle of the century the estate was known as Loftus Hill and associated with Henry Loftus, MP for Bannow in County Wexford and later Viscount of Ely. Peter Wilson's Dublin Directory of 1768 credits Loftus with several improvements to house and gardens, by then "enclosed with high stone walls, stocked with the best fruit trees, and such a collection of flowers as must captivate the most insensible eye". He reputedly laid a new carriage road around Killiney Hill, blasting the rock outcrops and filling them in with earth, and planted trees and shrubs down the hill's western side. A banqueting house he had planned for the woods went unbuilt; Wilson records that Loftus devoted his energies instead to works at Rathfarnham Castle. By the 1780s the leaseholder was Humphrey Minchin.

Thomas Bourchier, a Northamptonshire soldier, had settled in County Tipperary early in the 1700s, and his descendants intermarried with other Irish families; by the beginning of the 19th century their principal home was Killiney Castle. A later Thomas Bourchier held the offices of Clerk of the Crown, Hanaper, and Usher of the Black Rod in the Irish House of Commons, and his move to the area may have coincided with his appointment as deputy clerk in July 1797. The Tithe Applotment Book of 1826 lists the owner and occupier of "Mount Mapas" as Thomas Bourcheir Esq.

Francis Erlington Ball's History of the County Dublin reports that in 1796 a memorial was about to be placed on the hill, in pursuance of the will of the last Mr Mapas, who had left a large sum for a monument to his family. Thomas Bourchier, who died in 1832, seems to have completed the task. Bourchier's Obelisk, within Killiney Hill Park, is listed on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's Record of Protected Structures; it may be the smaller monument Ball describes, as distinct from the Killiney Hill Obelisk.

The battlements found an unkind reader in August 1834, when the Dublin Penny Journal set on the house as the residence of "some foolish city Goth who has contrived to make a burlesque upon castellation by affixing certain indentures to the top of his house", with "slashes in the walls and things like mustard pots and pepper castors at the corners" turning "a good old plain country mansion into a Babel building, where all art is confounded, taste abused... nonsense set upon a hill".

By the mid-19th century the estate was associated with Robert Warren, a solicitor and developer who had made a fortune selling land to the Dublin and Bray Railway. His house, Killiney House, was renamed Killiney Castle once it was given crenellations. The works, completed around 1840, are attributed by several sources including the Dictionary of Irish Architects to Warren's relative, the architect Sandham Symes, and took in castellations, mock-medieval corner towers, turrets, battlements and a Gothic porch. A Church of Ireland church dedicated to the Holy Trinity was built on the demesne in 1859.

Warren held influence with the railway company because he owned the coastal lands along the route from Dalkey to Bray and beyond. After some negotiation a tunnel was built and the line opened, and as part of the agreement Obelisk Hill Halt was put up on Warren's land, raising the value of his holdings and quickening the rate of local development.

By the early 1870s a number of Warren's investments and development projects had failed, and in 1871 the Landed Estates Court obliged him to sell the Killiney land at auction to pay off the related debts. Victoria Castle went under the hammer for £5,000 to Humphrey Lloyd, then provost of Trinity College; after the sale Warren had enough money to pay off his main creditors, and when he handed the court more than £11,000 the remaining properties were taken out of the auction. He stayed on at Killiney Castle and passed it to his son, Robert Warren junior, by 1873.

By the mid-1870s the house had been bought by the Jesuit Order in Ireland for use as a villa, or holiday house, and the order occupied it between 1877 and 1880. Thomas Chippendall Higgin bought the place around 1880 and added a half-octagonal castellated tower, a cut-stone doorway and an entrance porch at the front, the door-case worked in a seventeenth-century manner and carrying a carved plaque. Higgin was buried on top of Dalkey Hill in 1906, where a broken cross is inscribed "Dust thou art, to dust returneth, Was not spoken of the soul".

The castle was used as a base by the Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence of 1919–1921, and by the Irish Republican Army during the Civil War of 1922–1923. It was burned afterwards and left largely abandoned, and was reputedly used again as an IRA base during the organisation's campaign of sabotage and bombings in the 1930s. During the Emergency of 1939–1945 the building was requisitioned and used as billets for the Irish Army.

The Fitzpatrick family acquired the castle after the war and converted it, and it opened as a hotel in 1971 under their name.