Building For Peace

Hillsborough Castle, Co Down The home of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland After five years of repair and renovation, a house at the centre of political life in Northern Ireland has opened to the public. John Goodall reports.

- John Goodall

FOR the past five years, one of Ireland’s outstanding country houses has been in the process of transformation. Hillsborough Castle, an official Government residence for nearly a century, has been the object of a major programme of repair and renovation at the hands of Historic Royal Palaces (HRP). It is not only the scale of these works that is hugely impressive: they have taken place at a moment where the Northern Ireland peace process looms large in the European consciousness. Political circumstances, indeed, lend a powerful resonance to this project that is hard to parallel.

The Georgian town of Hillsborough occupies the site of a medieval settlement, known in the early 17th century as the ‘crooked glen’, or Cromlyn. In 1611, this hamlet, with a ruinous church dedicated to St Malachy and a ring fort or rath, was among the appropriated estates of the Magennis family that came into the possession of Sir Moyses Hill. He had first come to Ireland four decades earlier as an adventurer in the service of the Earl of Essex and secured several important Crown appointments in Ulster.

After his death in 1630, Sir Moyses’s second son, Arthur, began or completed a fort on the site of the rath at Cromlyn. It was one in a series along the road that connected Dublin with the principal city in Ulster, Carrickfergus, just north of Belfast.

During the 1630s, Arthur Hill further increased his Ulster estates by offering mortgages to indebted landowners. He was returned as an MP to the Irish parliament and, following the rising of 1641, he became colonel of a cavalry regiment. For the next two decades, he passed politically unscathed through the Civil War and the Commonwealth and was confirmed in his estates by Charles II after the Restoration.