Overview
Camlin Castle is a castle you can’t visit, because the castle is gone. What stands on the R230 between Ballyshannon and Belleek is its front door: a castellated gateway, a round flag tower and a run of screen wall, built around 1838 for a house the ESB knocked down in the 1940s. The reason it was demolished is the reason to know the place at all. Planners were certain the new Assaroe Lake would drown the site, so they levelled the house ahead of the water. The water never reached it.
There isn’t much to do here in the active sense. The gateway sits on private land, the flag tower and gate lodge are closed, and you take it in from the roadside as you pass. Give it ten minutes: it’s a photo stop and a curiosity on the drive between the two towns, not a destination in its own right. The draw is the quality of the stonework and the flat absurdity of the story behind it.
Architecture
The freestanding gateway was designed by John Benjamin Keane (d. 1859), an architect better known for his Catholic churches, and commissioned by John A. Tredennick. It is Tudor-Revival: medieval military dress on refined masonry, built from snecked and dressed ashlar with a slight batter at the base. The parts worth looking at:
- The carriage arch – Tudor-arched, with chamfered stone reveals, blind triangular motifs in the spandrels and a hoodmoulding over the top.
- The flag tower – a circular tower that dominates the whole composition, crowned with a machicolated parapet on moulded corbels and Irish-style crenellations.
- Defensive detailing – blind loophole openings and circular gun-port motifs at the base and head of the tower, all for show.
- Screen walls – quadrant walls curving out from the gateway, castellated and cut-stone coped.
- The gates – the Saxon-style metal gates are 20th-century replacements for the original timber ones.
The cut-stone work has weathered decades of exposure and neglect and still reads crisply, which is the main argument for stopping.
History
The Camlin estate came to the Tredennicks in 1718, when William Tredennick, newly arrived in Ireland from Cornwall, took a lease of the land from William ‘Speaker’ Conolly, the Ballyshannon-born politician who had lately acquired the former Folliott lands. The family held on for two centuries, becoming substantial landlords in the parish of Kilbarron with ground on both banks of the Erne. At Griffith’s Valuation in the mid-19th century, Camlin was held in fee by John A. Tredennick and valued at £65. It was Tredennick who, in 1838, had Keane rebuild the house, folding fabric from an earlier 17th-century structure into the new design and laying out the long approach avenue the gateway was built to announce.
The demolition
The end came with the Erne Hydro-Electric Scheme. Through the 1940s and early 1950s the ESB widened and deepened the river and built generating stations at Cliff and Cathaleen’s Fall to bring power and work to south Donegal. Camlin sat in the path of the projected reservoir, or so the calculations said, and rather than gamble on it the house was pulled down. There was no local or national outcry. The scheme was popular, and one more empty landlord’s house counted for little against electricity and jobs.
Then the lake filled and stopped well short of the site. The foundations of the main house are still there, dry, above a shoreline the water was never going to reach. The scheme itself works to this day: the Cathaleen’s Fall station downstream runs a salmon hatchery and fish pass, releasing around 500,000 smolts a year and trapping some four million elvers to restock the Erne’s eel fishery. It simply never needed to take the house.
Visiting
The gateway stands beside the R230 along the north side of the Erne and Assaroe Lake, and you see it straight from the road. It’s private land, so treat it as a look-and-photograph stop: the gate lodge and flag tower are closed and there’s nothing to walk around. There are no facilities on site; the nearest cafés, shops and fuel are in Ballyshannon to the north-east and Belleek to the south-west.
Nearby
- Assaroe Lake and Abbey – walking trails along the reservoir that spared Camlin, plus the ruins of a medieval abbey near Ballyshannon.
- Cliff Power Station – the other half of the hydro scheme that cost Camlin its house, and a fair primer on the engineering that reshaped the lower Erne.
- Ballyshannon – often called Ireland’s oldest town, with a riverside walk and a decent run of cafés a few minutes north-east.
Time it for late afternoon if you can. The low sun rakes across the ashlar and throws the crenellations into relief; at midday the whole face flattens out.