Ireland · Still standing
Killyleagh Castle
Killyleagh Castle is a privately owned castle in the village of Killyleagh, County Down, Northern Ireland, with fabric on the site dating back to 1180 and long association with the Hamilton family from the early 17th century. The present romantic silhouette was created in the mid-19th century when Sir Charles Lanyon remodelled and re‑encased the house in a Loire‑château manner while retaining earlier towers and walls.
Its prime
1860
Today
Still standing
As it stood in 1860
What Killyleagh Castle looked like in its prime.
A three-storey rectangular stone main block with a steep slate roof and several dormer gables is flanked by two large cylindrical corner towers with conical slate roofs and slender spires; the towers rise slightly above a crenellated wall line and show a corbelled band beneath the roof. The central façade is of darker dressed stone with regular mullioned windows and a pronounced carved arched doorcase set above a short balustraded terrace. A low fortified bawn and a matching baronial gatehouse enclose a broad grassed approach.
Its story
The story of Killyleagh Castle.
De Courcy's Fortifications Around Strangford Lough, 1180
The Norman knight Sir John de Courcy settled Killyleagh in the late twelfth century and raised fortifications on the castle's site in 1180, one of a series he built around Strangford Lough to hold the lands he had seized from the native Irish. Parts of the castle are believed to date from that work, and it is reckoned one of the oldest inhabited castles in the country. Its architecture carries no trace of an Irish tower house or castle.
Con O'Neill's Pardon and the Hamilton Grant, 1602-1625
In 1602 the Gaelic chieftain Con O'Neill of Clandeboye held large tracts of North Down, Killyleagh among them. After a quarrel he sent his men against English soldiers and was imprisoned for it; his wife struck a bargain with the Scots aristocrat Hugh Montgomery, offering half of O'Neill's lands in return for a royal pardon. Montgomery obtained the pardon, but King James I divided the territory three ways, and the ground from Killyleagh to Bangor went to another Scot, James Hamilton, later 1st Viscount Claneboye.
A map of Killyleagh drawn in 1625 shows the castle as a single tower on the south side of a residence. About that year Hamilton moved his household from Bangor to Killyleagh and built the courtyard walls. It has been a Hamilton house ever since.
Cromwell's Gunboats in the Lough, 1649
Viscount Claneboye's son, the 1st Earl of Clanbrassil, added the second tower and stood with Charles I. In 1649 Cromwell's forces sailed gunboats into Strangford Lough, besieged the castle and blew up the gatehouse. The Earl fled, leaving his wife and children behind, and Parliament fined him for the return of the castle and his land.
His son, the 2nd Earl, rebuilt in 1666, raising the north tower and building - or perhaps restoring - the long fortified bawn across the front. It is mostly the 2nd Earl's castle that remains.
The Destroyed Will and the Divided Castle, 1667-1697
The 2nd Earl married Lady Alice Moore, daughter of the Earl of Drogheda, in 1667; their only child died in infancy. Lady Alice discovered that her father-in-law's will directed that, should his son die without issue, the estate be divided between five Hamilton cousins. She destroyed it, and in 1674 had her husband make a will leaving the estate to her. Henry, Lord Clanbrassil, died of poisoning in 1675 and Lady Alice in 1677, leaving the property to her brother.
The cousins knew what the first will had said and pressed their claim for twenty years, until a copy of it was found - by which time every one of them was dead. The last, James Hamilton of Neilsbrook in County Antrim, had been confident of winning and had bequeathed the estate in halves: one to his daughter Anne Stevenson, the other to his younger brothers Gawn and William. In 1697 the probate court duly cut the castle in two, giving Gawn and William the main house and the two towers and Anne the bawn and gate house. The brothers had to open a new entrance on the north side to get into their own castle.
Lanyon's Turrets and the Gunfire of the 1920s
William died childless in 1716 and the castle descended through Gawn Hamilton's line. His great-grandson Archibald Hamilton Rowan, an Irish nationalist of the United Irishmen, kept it as one of his homes between 1806 and 1834, after returning from exile in America. Rowan's grandson Archibald Rowan-Hamilton and his wife employed Sir Charles Lanyon from 1850, and it is his work that gave the castle its romantic silhouette of turrets in the manner of a Loire Valley chateau; he re-encased the entire exterior while respecting the original fenestration, and kept the vaulted rooms in the northern circular tower. Benjamin Ferrey supplied a baronial gatehouse to match the two surviving corner towers.
The bawn and gate house had meanwhile passed down Anne Stevenson's side of the family. In 1860 the 5th Baron Dufferin and Claneboye gave them back to the Hamiltons and commissioned a replacement gate house to better match the main castle; two years later he married his distant cousin Hariot Georgina Rowan-Hamilton, adding Hamilton to his own surname just before the wedding. Lanyon's imposing doorcase was a celebration of the Rowan-Hamiltons reaching their front door for the first time in almost two hundred years.
The castle came under attack from the Irish Republican Army in the early 1920s. Gawn Rowan Hamilton, who lives there with his family, has described a Belfast Telegraph cutting recording "my great-great uncle being woken at 2 am and exchanging gunfire from the battlements". Killyleagh was listed Grade A in December 1978.
Step inside
11 places to explore in 1860.
The record describes 11 distinct spots at Killyleagh Castle, including 5 interiors: vaulted room in the northern circular tower, pentagonal room in the georgian counterpart tower, drawing room looking south into the garden and more. Create your own photoreal reconstruction and explore every one, more scenes means more rooms, more angles, and more of the place to stand in.
Build Your Own Castle
Recreate Killyleagh Castle with AI to explore it.
The artist rebuilds it as it stood in 1860, a photoreal reconstruction that belongs to you alone. Pay with coins, no subscription needed.
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Clans who held Killyleagh Castle.
The families that held Killyleagh Castle for a decade or more across its history, follow a name to its clan.
Owned by the Hamilton family since the early 17th century; still home to Gawn Rowan Hamilton.
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