A family seat for 270 years
The Bellinghams, 1690 to 1958
The Bellingham family came to Louth as Cromwellian planters in the 1650s and built their first house at Gernonstown around then. The Williamite War of 1689–91 levelled it. Sir Henry Bellingham rebuilt around 1690 in the form that the present castle still carries. Sir Alan Henry Bellingham (1846–1921), the Catholic-convert baronet, restored it in the 1880s and remade the village in the picturesque style that survives. The family left in the late 1950s. Dermot Meehan bought the castle from the Irish Land Commission in 1958 and converted it to a hotel; the Corscadden family bought it in December 2012 and have run it since. Two hundred and seventy years of one family is unusual in Irish history — the inset biblical panels on the village houses are an unmissable reminder of what their last decades looked like.
Sir Alan Henry's panels
The picturesque village
Sir Alan Henry Bellingham was a devout Catholic convert who used the village as a kind of devotional canvas. The upper facades of many of the houses around the green carry inset religious panels — biblical scenes set into the stone — and the window sills of others have biblical quotations cut directly into the cut stone. There is also a calvary memorial he commissioned, and a row of charitable almshouses he built for widows of the parish. The combination is unique in Ireland. Most estate villages were built on Anglican lines; this one is one of the few Catholic-restoration estate villages, and the iconography on the buildings is the proof.
A village name on every footpath
Kilsaran Concrete, 1964
In 1964 Patrick McKeown founded a small concrete operation in the village of Kilsaran. Sixty years on, the company he started is Ireland's largest independent concrete and paving manufacturer, employing around 500 people and running plants and quarries the country over. The road surfacing division opened in 1967. The paving division opened at Clonee in 1994. The company headquarters is now in Co. Meath, and the family still run it. Locally the joke is that more Irish people walk on Kilsaran every day than have ever heard of Castlebellingham; only one of those things is exportable.
A monument that changed sides
The 1798 stone
On the village green stands a memorial that has had two lives. It was originally erected to a British officer killed near here during the 1798 Rising — Captain Thomas Bellingham. In the 20th century the inscription was contested; the present plaque also commemorates the local Irish dead of the same Rising. It is one of the few monuments in Ireland that explicitly remembers both sides of 1798 on the same stone. Worth five minutes when you walk the green.