Ballygally Castle

Ballygally Castle stands on the Antrim coast road three miles north of Larne, and the date cut over its old doorway settles both its age and its builders: 1625, above the motto GODIS PROVIDENS IS MY INHERITANS and a shield bearing the initials I.S. and I.B. — James Shaw, a younger son of the lairds of Greenock, and his wife Isabella Brisbane. It has been a hotel since 1938 and has belonged to Hastings Hotels since 1966. The hotel tells guests that Isabella was shut in a turret room by her husband and fell to her death from the window, and it keeps a Ghost Room at the top of the spiral stair. That story is absent from the castle's fullest history, written in 1884 by the Rev Classon Porter while his own family was living in the building. Porter records a different ghost altogether — Madam Nixon, an eighteenth-century widow who was said to walk the passages in a silk dress and knock on bedroom doors — and notes that even she had stopped being heard of.

The age of Ballygally Castle is not a matter of opinion: it is cut in stone over the old entrance doorway. When the Rev Classon Porter wrote the castle's history he copied the inscription exactly — "1625. GODIS . PROVIDENS . IS . MY INHERITANS" — and described the armorial escutcheon above it, which carries the letters I.S. and I.B. and the arms of two families. Those are the initials of James Shaw, who built the castle, and of Isabella Brisbane, his wife. The stones, Porter noted, were mostly local, not shipped from Scotland as tradition claimed, and 1625 was probably the year the work was finished rather than begun. James Shaw was a younger son of the lairds of Greenock. Like many Scottish cadets he came to Ireland to make his fortune, arriving about 1606 and settling first on the County Down lands of his brother-in-law Sir Hugh Montgomery of Braidstane. Within a few years he moved north to the parish of Cairncastle, between Larne and Glenarm, where he held land not from the Crown but as a freeholder under Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim. The surviving grants are dated 21 February 1621, 1 February 1634 — eighteen score acres in Ballygellie, Tarnemoney, Nogher, Carncaslen and Corcermain, in fee farm at twenty-four pounds a year — and 8 August 1637. No grant survives for the year the castle was built. What went up was a Scottish tower house on the French chateau model: high walls about five feet thick pierced with loopholes for musketry, a steep roof, dormer windows and cone-topped corner turrets. The stairs inside were stone and spiral, and an open stream of water ran through the outer hall so that the household could withstand a siege. Two walled courtyards enclosed it, one inside the other, running to the sea at either end, with stables, byres, a brew-house and a dovecot inside them and a corn mill in the glen across the river. Porter could still point to the gate pillars of both courtyards in 1884, and noted that one of them had been knocked down to make way for the shore road. The defences were used. When the rising of 1641 broke out, Shaw shut his gates and took in his servants, tenants and neighbours; called away to Scotland that Christmas, he left the little garrison under his agent James Cromie of the Droagh. An Irish garrison at Glenarm tried repeatedly and never got in. Porter records, from an official document of the period, what happened to some who were sheltering there: the two sons and the daughter of John Jamieson of Ballygawn were sent to a barn for corn and were ridden down by six horsemen; one boy escaped by swimming a river, the other was hanged over Glenarm bridge and his sister held prisoner for weeks. A boy named William Hunter was drowned, held under with pikes. The Ballygally garrison rode out on reprisals of the same kind. Shaw's own son, Captain John Shaw, was away with his regiment at the siege of Antrim; his daughter Eleanor had married Captain John Agnew of Kilwaughter. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century the castle filled up. Squire Henry Shaw had married a Miss Hamilton, of the family of Sir John Hamilton of Donemana in County Tyrone. Two of her sisters, both widowed and childless — one had been married to the last Lord Slane, the other to a Nixon of County Fermanagh — came to live with her, bringing their servants. A new block was built at the west corner and joined to the castle by a passage; it was known as "the new room" or "Madam Nixon's room". A well outside the entrance was called My Lady's Well after Lady Slane, and another at the foot of Ballygally hill was called Madam Nixon's Well. In the same years the Larne educational reformer David Manson lived at the castle as tutor to the Shaw children, and a room was long called after him. The family's ruin came from a lawsuit, not a ghost. John Shaw, childless, had adopted his nephew Henry as heir. Shaw's brother-in-law Dr M'Cullough of Larne turned him against the boy, took him to Larne where he fell ill, kept his relatives from seeing him, and after five or six weeks rode out and seized the castle. Only then did it emerge that John Shaw was dead and had been buried at midnight in Cairncastle churchyard. M'Cullough produced a will leaving him everything, installed a seneschal who watched a window with a loaded blunderbuss, and sold perpetual leases cheaply to fund his defence. The case came to trial at Carrickfergus in 1790; Henry Shaw accepted a compromise against his counsel's advice, paid M'Cullough 4,000 pounds and got back an estate halved in value. Henry died in 1799. His son William, the last Squire of Ballygally, sold the property in 1820 for 15,400 pounds to Jones Agnew of Kilwaughter. The castle then served for several years as a coastguard station, and by 1884 it was occupied by the widow and family of Classon Porter himself. The first hotel opened in 1938, after the Earl of Antrim bought the place. In the early 1950s the textile millionaire Cyril Lord took it over and refitted it, and in 1966 Sir William Hastings bought it from him for 40,000 pounds. It has been a Hastings hotel ever since: four-star status from the Northern Ireland Tourist Board in 2007 after a three-million-pound programme, a further extension in 2014 that added ten Coastal Deluxe bedrooms and the Kintyre Ballroom, and a 400,000-pound refurbishment announced in March 2025 for the castle's four hundredth anniversary.

Ballygally Castle is open and trading. It is a four-star hotel of 54 bedrooms on the Coast Road at Ballygally, Co. Antrim BT40 2QZ, owned by Hastings Hotels since 1966; the telephone is +44 (0)28 2858 1066. It sits directly on the A2 about three miles north of Larne and roughly 26 miles from Belfast, facing the beach at the head of Ballygally Bay, with free parking at the front. Larne has ferry and rail connections; the coast road continues north to Glenarm, the Glens of Antrim and the Giant's Causeway. The seventeenth-century tower is the core of a much larger modern hotel, and it is not a museum: there is no ticketed visit and no fixed opening hours for the castle itself. The Ghost Room is a small turret room at the top of the old spiral staircase, in the oldest part of the building. The hotel describes it as "the bedroom of the Lady Isabella Shaw" and it is not let as ordinary accommodation; the bookable rooms in the tower are the Tower Rooms. Access to the Ghost Room is at the hotel's discretion — historically the site invited guests to ask, and an earlier version of the page offered a "Ghost Tour with a member of the Hotel staff" on request by telephone. Ask at reception rather than turning up expecting entry, and be aware that residents come first. Accessibility is the real limitation. The tower is reached by a narrow stone spiral stair with no lift, which rules it out for wheelchair users and for anyone unsteady on steep steps; the modern parts of the hotel, the Garden Restaurant and the lounge are on level ground. The bar, restaurant and afternoon tea are open to non-residents, which is the cheapest way to see the building. If you want the tower, book a Tower Room and ask when you arrive.