Two squares, by design
The town the Annesleys built
Castlewellan is not an accidental town. William Annesley laid it out in the 1750s with two formal squares — Upper for the old town, Lower for the new — joined by a main street wide enough to drive a herd through, all of it lined with chestnut trees. The Market House at the top of the Upper Square was put up in 1764 and is now the library. The second-Monday market and the May Day and November horse fairs are still on the same dates after two hundred and seventy years. Few small Irish towns can say that.
How Castlewellan grew an arboretum
The 5th Earl and his trees
The 4th Earl Annesley built the castle in 1856-59 to a William Burn design in local granite. His son, the 5th Earl, was the one who really mattered to anyone with a spade. He turned the demesne into one of the great gardens of the British Isles — a walled garden of twelve and a half acres at the heart, an arboretum running out to a hundred and twenty, plants pulled in from China, the Andes, the Pacific Northwest. The collection is still ranked in the top three in these islands for size, age and condition. The Forest Service took the land on in 1967; the trees are still doing their work.
A cypress born in a glasshouse here
Castlewellan Gold
In 1962 Mr McKeown, the head gardener at the Castlewellan estate, sowed cones from a golden Monterey cypress that had grown up next to a golden Nootka cypress. One of the seedlings was unusual. Planted out in 1965, it became Castlewellan Gold — a cultivar of Leyland cypress that has since been propagated around the world and stands today in suburban hedges from Surrey to Sydney. The original tree is still here, in the arboretum that bred it.
Six thousand yews and a bell
The Peace Maze
Between 2000 and 2001 volunteers from across Northern Ireland planted six thousand yew trees into a hedge maze in the forest park, marking the peace process and the new century at the same time. It opened in 2001 as the world's largest permanent hedge maze — Longleat eventually took the record back, so it is now the world's second-largest, with about three kilometres of path winding to a Peace Bell in the middle. Bring children. Or do not, and listen for the bell from the lake path; you can hear it when it is rung.