Clandeboye is one of the few great estates in Northern Ireland still owned by the family that made it, settled in 1674 as Ballyleidy on the outskirts of Bangor in County Down. The current house was built in 1801–04 to a design by Robert Woodgate, who worked the core of an earlier building into it, for Sir James Blackwood, 2nd Baron Dufferin and Clandeboye; the estate later took its name from the old Gaelic territory of Clann Aodha Buidhe, ‘the family of Hugh the Blonde’. Its 2,000 acres hold the largest area of broad-leaved woodland in Northern Ireland – oak, birch and beech. But the thing to walk up to is Helen’s Tower.
Helen’s Tower and the Somme
Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826–1902) – a Victorian diplomat who went on to govern both Canada and India – built the tower in the 1850s for his mother, Helen, Lady Dufferin, a songwriter and poet and a granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. William Burn designed it in the Scottish Baronial style. Inside, the library is panelled in oak, its walls hung with metal plates engraved with poems written for Helen and her tower by Tennyson, Browning and Kipling among others. Tennyson’s opens:
Helen’s Tower, here I stand, Dominant over sea and land. Son’s love built me, and I hold Mother’s love in letter’d gold.
Sixty years on, the tower took on a second meaning. The 36th (Ulster) Division trained in the fields below it from 1914, and the tower was a familiar landmark to the men before they left for the Western Front. After the Battle of the Somme, an almost exact replica – the Ulster Tower – was raised at Thiepval in France and dedicated on 19 November 1921 to the Division’s dead. You can stay in the original: it’s let as self-catering accommodation by the Irish Landmark Trust, which means a night in that Victorian library.
The woods and gardens
The 1st Marquess laid out the parklands in the nineteenth century and added the house’s banqueting hall in 1898. The walled and woodland gardens sit by the house and courtyard, the woodland section planted with a large collection of rhododendrons that take to this mild, damp corner of Down. The gardens and house are not generally open – the walled gardens open only a couple of days a year for the National Garden Scheme, so check the dates and any charge before you build a visit around them. The woods and parkland, by contrast, are open year-round, and that is where most of the appeal lies.
The estate is still a working, and unusually green, farm. It makes its own Clandeboye yoghurt from the dairy herd, and a 250kW anaerobic digester fed on grass and silage keeps the farm close to energy self-sufficient, even heating Clandeboye House through a district-heating loop. Lady Dufferin – Lindy, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, an artist who lived here until her death in October 2020 – brought the Conservation Volunteers’ Northern Ireland base onto the estate back in 1975.
Walking the estate
A five-mile section of the Clandeboye Way, part of the long-distance Ulster Way, runs through the estate, and the Columban Way heritage trail crosses it on its 20-mile route between Comber and Bangor. The classic walk starts at Helen’s Bay station, follows the old Clandeboye Avenue carriage path, skirts the Blackwood golf course and climbs through oak and beech to Helen’s Tower, with the County Down countryside opening out below. One real warning: the route crosses the Belfast–Bangor dual carriageway, and you have to time it and cross with care. Dogs are welcome on the estate – keep them on short leads near the gardens.
Visiting
The main entrance is off the A2 Belfast–Bangor road about two miles before Bangor, parking there is free, and the estate is only eight miles from George Best Belfast City Airport. The big fixture is the Clandeboye Festival each August, a week of classical music with Barry Douglas’s Camerata Ireland, now in its 25th year and billed as the Camerata Music Festival; 2026 also marks the bicentenary of the 1st Marquess’s birth, with events on the estate. The 4-star Clandeboye Lodge Hotel sits on the edge of the grounds, with its Coq & Bull brasserie, and Crawfordsburn Country Park on the coast is a short drive off. But the reason to come is the climb to Helen’s Tower – do that, and if the tower’s open, read the poems on the library wall.