Malahide Castle

The estate began in 1185, when Richard Talbot, a knight who had accompanied Henry II to Ireland in 1174, was granted the "lands and harbour of Malahide". The oldest parts of the castle date back to the 12th century, and it remained home to the Talbot family for 791 years, from 1185 until 1976. The building was notably enlarged in the reign of Edward IV, and towers were added in 1765.

The single break in the Talbot tenure came with the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, when Oliver Cromwell granted the castle to Miles Corbet, who held it from 1649 to 1660. Corbet was hanged following Cromwell's demise, and Malahide was restored to the Talbots.

The family remained Roman Catholic until 1774 and weathered the penal laws. The estate also survived the Battle of the Boyne, on the morning of which fourteen members of the owner's family sat down to breakfast in the Great Hall; by evening all of them were dead.

In 1918, during the First World War, a mooring-out base for airships was established in the castle grounds. The airships came from RNAS Anglesey in Wales and flew anti-submarine operations over the Irish Sea. Plans to base airships at Malahide from 1919 were abandoned at the end of the war.

In the 1920s the private papers of James Boswell were discovered in the castle and sold by his great-great-grandson, Lord Talbot de Malahide, to the American collector Ralph H. Isham; a second cache found soon afterwards was also purchased by Isham. The papers have since passed to Yale University, which has published popular and scholarly editions of Boswell's journals and correspondence.

The 7th Baron Talbot had wanted to donate the castle to the state. On his death in 1973 it passed to his sister Rose, who had lived at Malahide as a caretaker in the 1950s. She faced death duties, and since the government would not accept valuables in payment, much of the contents — notably the furnishings — had to be sold, a cause of some controversy; private and government parties were later able to retrieve some pieces from the purchasers. In 1975, Rose ceded the castle to the Irish State, with regret, to fund the outstanding inheritance taxes.