Ballyseede Castle

Tralee though isn’t known keeping tourists in town for as long as the more popular towns in Kerry, the likes of Killarney, Dingle or Killorglin. That being said it is a lively, friendly town with some good pubs, restaurants and shopping, and it has some lovely countryside around it.

No stay in Co. Kerry though would be complete without a journey around at least some of the Ring of Kerry, the amazingly scenic road that runs along the coastline around Killarney. So too the Dingle peninsula, west of Tralee, which has some more gorgeous mountain scenery, the Brandon Pass particularly, and leads on to the lovely, and very lively, harbour town which lends the peninsula its name.

The staff at Ballyseede Castle can offer plenty of advice and can organise activities for you in the local area. Kerry is spoiled with golf courses for example, with Ballybunion just to the north being the most well known though Killarney golf course is also very much on the map.

Tralee too has its own golf course, an excellent 18 hole course designed by the legendary Arnold Palmer. It is in a very scenic location too, 9 miles west of the town, overlooking the sea near Barrow Harbour and near to Barrow Beach.

Horse riding can be organized from Ballyseede too, with some nice trails running around the nearby hills. Watersports can also be organized, everything from surfing on the wild Atlantic to boating and fishing.

Shannon airport is less than an hour and a half from the castle, with Limerick city being a little less. Cork city can also be reached in about an hour and a half, while the trip to Dublin will take about three hours.

The original castle was more of a fortress than what we see today. It was built by perhaps 16th century Munster’s most powerful family, the Fitzgeralds, in the mid part of that century and would soon bear witness to  their demise during the unsuccessful Desmond Rebellions, when the head of the Fitzgeralds, the 16th Earl of Desmond, rose up against English control of the region. His name was Gerald Fitzgerald and he would meet his own demise at Ballyseede itself when he was beheaded after being captured on the run in the Stack Mountains outside Tralee.

This was 1583, and with the capture and execution of its leader the rebellion was now effectively over. Keen to make an example out of the rebel Earl, Queen Elizabeth I ordered that his head be sent to London and kept on display in a cage on London Bridge.

The Fitzgeralds were of course immediately stripped of ownership of Ballyseede and all its associated lands. In 1590 the estate, which at the time comprised over 3000 acres, was leased by the Crown to a Thomas Blennerhassett from Cumberland, North West England for an nominal annual rent of 6 pounds and, strangely enough, a single red rose to be picked each year from the castle gardens.

The castle structure from the time of the Fitzgeralds was replaced in 1721 by the one we see today, which is more a manor house type property than a fortress castle. The architecture being a reflection of more stable times, and the Blennerhassetts were allowed to remain there relatively peacefully, and undisturbed, right up to 1965, and even when some of the atrocities of the war of Independence and the resulting civil war were right at their doorstep.

Perhaps the most famous of the Blennerhassetts would be the last of them to call Ballyseede home. Hilda was her name and she would be something a war hero, not as a soldier but as a nurse, where her efforts in helping injured soldiers during WWI earned her the high honour of a Mons Star, something very rarely given out to non military officers, and especially a female one.

Though, as mentioned, she would the last of the Blennerhassetts to call Ballyseede home, legend has it that she never really left. The castle has oft been mentioned in lists of the world’s most haunted hotels and it is said the ghost of someone, believed to be Hilda, appears now and then, in particular, for some unknown reason, on the 24th of March each year. Many have claimed to see her, and to have felt other spooky goings on. For example though the annual rent of a single red rose has long been consigned to history many people say they sometimes get quite a strong smell of roses from the top floor of the building.