Trim Castle

The land of Meath belonged to the church until 1172, when Henry II of England granted it to Hugh de Lacy as one of his new administrative areas. De Lacy raised a huge ringwork castle on the hilltop, defended by a stout double palisade and an external ditch, on raised ground commanding a fording point of the River Boyne — a river then navigable by boat some 25 miles from the Irish Sea. Part of a stone-footed timber gatehouse still lies beneath the present stone gate on the west side. The castle is named in the Norman poem The Song of Dermot and the Earl.

When de Lacy left Ireland he entrusted the castle to Hugh Tyrrel, baron of Castleknock, one of his chief lieutenants. Forces of the Gaelic High King of Ireland, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, attacked and burnt the ringwork; Tyrrel appealed in vain for help and was forced to flee. Ua Conchobair soon withdrew, and in 1173 de Lacy — or Raymond FitzGerald — immediately repaired or rebuilt the castle.

After Hugh's death in 1186 his son Walter de Lacy succeeded as Lord of Meath and carried the rebuilding on in stone. The central three-storey keep rose in at least three stages — begun by Hugh around 1174, continued by Walter in 1196 and 1201–05 — and its design is unique among Norman keeps: cruciform in shape, with twenty corners. The castle as a whole was completed in the 1220s, most likely in 1224, and at 30,000 square metres it is the largest Cambro-Norman castle in Ireland.

The curtain walls belong predominantly to three phases. The rectangular towers of the west and north sides, including the Trim Gate, date to the 1170s, the gate itself sitting on top of the demolished wooden gateway. The Dublin Gate in the south wall, a single round-towered gate with an external barbican tower of the 1190s or early 13th century, was the first of its type built in Ireland.

On Walter de Lacy's death in 1241 his granddaughter Mathilda inherited the castle. Her second husband was Geoffrey de Geneville, Lord of Vaucouleurs in Champagne and brother of the crusade historian Jean de Joinville. At the end of the 13th century and the start of the 14th, the castle gained a new great hall with undercroft and attached solar, a new forebuilding, and stables added to the keep. Geoffrey's granddaughter Joan married Roger Mortimer, later 1st Earl of March, in 1301; in 1308 Geoffrey conveyed his Irish lordships to Mortimer and entered the priory of St Mary's in Trim.

The Mortimers held Trim until the male line died out in 1425 with Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, when the estate passed to Richard of York. Richard was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, and in 1461 his son, King Edward IV, appointed Germyn Lynch, a London goldsmith, as his warden at Trim and master worker of the new issues of moneys and coins within the castles of Dublin and Trim and the town of Galway.

During the 15th century the Irish Parliament met at Trim Castle seven times, a mint operated within its walls, and the castle served as the centre of administration for Meath, marking the outer northern boundary of the Pale. In the 16th century it fell into decline, but it was refortified during the Irish Confederate Wars of the 1640s. In 1649, after the sacking of Drogheda, the garrison of Trim fled to join other Irish forces, and the castle was occupied by the army of Oliver Cromwell.

After the wars of the 1680s the castle was granted to the Wellesley family, who held it until Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, sold it to the Leslies. It later passed through the Encumbered Estates Court to the Dunsany Plunketts, who kept the castle and its surrounds until 1993, when Lord Dunsany sold the land and buildings to the State, retaining only river access and fishing rights. The Office of Public Works then undertook exploratory works and conservation costing around 4.5 million euro, including partial restoration of the moat and a protective roof over the keep, and the castle reopened to the public in 2000.