Tag Archives: Glenarm Castle

Through the Gate




After Monday’s post showing the wonderfully restored walled garden at Glenarm Castle, County Antrim, here is the Barbican Gate. Located on the far side of a bridge leading into the village, the building dates from 1825 when designed by Sir William Morrison to accompany the transformation of the main house from a classical residence into a Tudoresque fantasy for his client, Anne Katherine Mac Donnell, Countess of Antrim. Like a miniature castle, the Barbican is replete with turrets, towers and battlements and over the main entrance can be seen a sandstone coat of arms which was originally on the facade of Glenarm Castle and records its construction by Randle Mac Sorley Mac Donnell, first Earl of Antrim and his wife Alice O’Neill. The Barbican Gate has been restored by the Irish Landmark Trust and is now available to rent for short stays. 




The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?


Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;




Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;




But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
Photographs of the walled garden at Glenarm Castle, County Antrim

The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by

A Grand Soft Day

IMG_3963

Recently photographed on a typical Irish summer morning (that is to say in sleeting rain: the Irish Aesthete is nothing if not intrepid) the walled garden at Glenarm Castle, County Antrim. Dating from the 18th century, it originally provided the main house with fruit and vegetables but in recent years has been converted into a series of pleasure grounds open to the public, the upper sections designed by Catherine FitzGerald, eldest daughter of the late Knight of Glin. Above is an obelisk of oak created by local craftsman Corin Giles: what distinguishes this piece is the use of wood for a rusticated base. Meanwhile below a pair of rills flanked by beech hedges run down to a cascade before concluding in a pool; far below can be seen an opening cut into the yew circle dating from the 1820s. How simple devices can achieve powerful effects…

IMG_3962