Athcarne Castle
Athcarne Castle is a ruined Elizabethan castle outside the town of Duleek in County Meath, Ireland.
It was built in 1590 (possibly on the site of an earlier building) by the senior judge Sir William Bathe, member of a long established landowning family, and his wife Janet Dowdall. On his death in 1597 it passed to his brother. The Bathe family forfeited the Castle after the English Civil War, for their loyalty to the English Crown, but Sir Luke Bathe recovered it at the Restoration of Charles II.
Of many legends about the Castle, which is said to be haunted, the most plausible is that King James II of England slept here on his way to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the Castle being only six miles from the battlefield. The Bathe family sold the Castle about 1700: it passed eventually to the Gernon family who lived there until the mid twentieth century, after which it was abandoned.
It was originally built as a four storey mansion house. It was renovated in 1830 with the addition of a three storey extension and a thin turret tower, thus giving the appearance of a castle grafted onto a manor house. In the 1950s, after the Gernons left, the Castle began to fall into disrepair and is now a ruin.
References
- Ball, F. Elrington The Judges in Ireland 1221-1921 John Murray London 1926
- D'Alton, John King James' Irish Army List Celtic Bookshop Reprint Limerick 1997
- Dublin Penny Journal 1833 Vol. 1 No. 28