Ashford Castle

He arrived in the country in only about 1185, when the dust had settled somewhat on the main conflicts, and was soon granted the newly created post of Chief Governor of Limerick.

He then, sensibly, strategically, managed to ally himself with one of the few remaining Gaelic royal families of the time, the O’Briens, by marrying the daughter of Donal Mor O’Brien, King of Thomond.

With his power consolidated in that region he quickly set about conquering Connaught and the O’Connor lands to the north, and before his death in 1204, he had gained a good foothold in Co.Galway,

That foothold included the site of the present-day Ashford Castle which was at that point an abandoned monastic settlement.

Over two decades after his death, his son Richard, in between continuing the assault on the O’Connors, made plans for the old monastery at Ashford to become the family seat.

In 1228 the castle was built and was to become the stronghold of the House of Burke, a dynasty that would eventually take much of Connaught, and remain in a position of power there for more than three hundred years.

During those three hundred years the de Burghs/Burkes, like the majority of the first Norman invaders, were to become assimilated into Gaelic culture and customs.

They became pretty much indistinguishable from the ‘native’ Irish and their Norman ancestry would be, for all intents and purposes, an irrelevance.

An irrelevance it would also be to their Norman cousins across the Irish Sea, who were equally assimilated into England and now made up the bulk of the aristocracy and what became known as the Tudor Royal Family.

The most famous of all these former Norman Tudors was King Henry VIII who, in the pursuit of domestic bliss, set off a chain of events that changed Britain and Ireland forever.

Spited by the Vatican’s refusal to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and emboldened by the spread of Martin Luther’s anti-Vatican Protestant Church, he would turn his back on the Catholic Church and shape his own, Church of England.

His loyal subjects in Britain mainly followed suit, but the Irish, having enjoyed circumstantial semi-autonomy up until that point, mainly had not much of an idea as to who the King of England even was, never mind why they should bow to his favour.

Thus Ireland became an obvious sore point which would lead to yet further English invasions of the country, invasions where the historically recent Gaelicization, and therefore independence from the crown’s will, of the Hiberno-Normans would make them just as much of a target as anyone else.

Ashford Castle would bear witness to this when it, and the Burke lands surrounding it, came under constant attack by the new, English Protestant-appointed, Lord President of Connaught, Sir Richard Bingham.

In 1589 the Catholic Burkes were forced out and it became the possession of the English.

Less than a hundred years later though, in a twist of fate, it was granted by the English to Dominick Browne, the very first Catholic mayor of Galway city since the Tudor invasions.

An achievement in itself, for a Catholic mayorship, was a revolutionary concept, and one which would have been a total affront to the traditionalists among the original Tudor powers; when to remain a Catholic was to be native Irish, to be disloyal, and to be usurped immediately.

And so, as the rebel Burkes faded into political oblivion, in the more enlightened times of the 17th century, the Browne family, having somehow managed to keep a low profile during the previous sectarian wars, were now in a position to exploit the openness of the new era.

Religion had become just a suggestion of loyalty to the crown of England, and not an absolute decree, and thus Ashford Castle became theirs.

Ashford would then, against all the historic odds, remain comfortably within the Browne Family all the way up until 1852, when unsustainable lifestyles, and unsustainable debts, forced it into the so-called Encumbered Estates Court.

During that time though the Brownes would have already made some major renovation work on the castle, including the addition of the French Chateau-style Hunting Lodge.

The new buyer was Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, Lord Mayor of Dublin and a member of the famous brewing family. He added a couple of large Victorian-style extensions to the castle and bought land around it to expand the estate to 26,000 acres.

On his death in 1868, Ashford passed to his son Arthur, soon to be Lord Ardilaun, who developed the grounds and extended the building further in the Neo Gothic or Gothic Revival style fashionable in Victorian times.

Arthur would die in 1915 and the castle was passed to the Iveagh Trust, a charity set up by the Guinness Family.

Just over two decades later, in 1939, it was then sold to Noel Huggard, a hotelier from Co. Kerry, and thus Ashford Castle began its life as a hotel.

The influential Guinness family had often hosted famous guests there in the past, King George V and Oscar Wilde being just two examples, and that tradition would continue in its new life as a hotel, welcoming a diverse bunch of celebs over the years to include the likes of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan.