Overview
Gosford Castle is the largest listed building in Northern Ireland, and you can’t get inside any of it. In 2006 the derelict mock-Norman pile near Markethill was sold for £1,000 to a development company, which spent some £4 million carving it into 23 private apartments; residents moved in from 2008. It’s now somebody’s home, several times over, so the castle is a thing you look at, not tour.
What you can do is walk the Gosford Forest Park around it: 240 hectares (about 590 acres) of woodland and parkland with a herd of red deer, an old arboretum, and 16km of trails for walking, cycling and horse-riding. If you’ve come for the building, do the 1.8-mile Castle Trail and accept that the prize is the exterior. If you’ve come for a day out with children, the red deer on the Deer Park Trail are the better draw.
History and architecture
The Acheson family were granted this land in 1610, at the start of the Plantation of Ulster, and built a castle that was burned in the 1641 rebellion. Its replacement, Clonkearney Manor, stood for another two centuries – its old entrance arch still survives in the park, between the two millponds. The poet and satirist Jonathan Swift was a guest of the Achesons here in the 1720s and had a hand in laying out the early gardens; a rock known as Swift’s Chair is named for him.
In 1819 Archibald Acheson, 2nd Earl of Gosford, commissioned the London architect Thomas Hopper to build a new house, and chose the Norman-revival style – mock battlements, heavy granite from the Mullaglass quarries, the lot. It was Hopper’s first run at the style he later perfected at Penrhyn Castle in Wales. The thing took decades: begun in 1819, it was still unfinished into the 1850s, and ended up with something like 150 rooms, reputedly the largest house in Ireland.
The Earls of Gosford lived here until 1921, when the 4th Earl was forced to sell the contents. In the Second World War the castle was commandeered, holding British and American troops and, later, German prisoners of war. The Ministry of Agriculture then bought the demesne to create the forest park, while the building itself slid into serious disrepair – close enough to ruin that the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society was calling for intervention before the 2006 sale rescued it.
The trails
The walking routes are colour-coded and start from the main car park.
- Castle Trail (1.8 miles) – the one to do for the building. It runs past the arboretum and the walled garden to the boundary of the castle grounds, where you get the south front and the entrance façade. This is also the recognisable Game of Thrones angle (see below).
- Deer Park Trail (1.2 miles) – a largely level loop past the red-deer enclosure, the best bet with a pushchair or younger children, and the most reliable spot to actually see the deer.
- Boundary Trail (3.4 miles) – the long one, through mixed woodland and over the Drumlack River, for legs that want more.
For visitors with limited mobility, the park’s All Out Trekking service lends battery-powered off-road vehicles (age 12 and over) that can get out onto the walking and mountain-bike trails – a genuinely useful thing, not a token gesture.
Wildlife and Game of Thrones
The red deer are the headline, but the park also keeps longhorn cattle, rare-breed sheep and heavy draught horses on the open pasture, and the woodland holds red squirrels, woodpeckers and butterflies.
For Game of Thrones fans, Gosford stood in for Riverrun, seat of House Tully – this is where the beheading of Rickard Karstark was filmed. The exterior is easy to recognise from the Castle Trail, which is as close as anyone gets now that the interior is private flats.
Practical information
- Address: 7 Gosford Demesne, Markethill, County Armagh BT60 1GD, off the A28 Armagh–Newry road.
- Opening: The forest park is open all year, dawn to dusk. The castle is private and not open to visitors – stay on the public paths and respect that people live there.
- Parking: This is the one cost to plan for – a parking charge is payable on arrival, with annual passes available and overflow parking at busy times. The park itself has no separate admission fee.
- Facilities: On-site catering, picnic areas with BBQ stands, a woodland play area, and accessible toilets with baby-changing near the main car park. The park is managed by Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council.
Nearby
- Ardress House – an 18th-century National Trust farmhouse with walled garden and orchard, a short drive north.
- Ring of Gullion – the volcanic ring-dyke landscape south of here, with Slieve Gullion’s summit cairn and forest drive.
- Lurgan – market town to the north with the Victorian Brownlow House and the large Lurgan Park.
Time a weekday morning if you can: the deer are calmer, the Castle Trail is quiet, and you’ll get the south front to yourself for photographs.