Ashford Castle Review: Seven Centuries of Irish Hospitality

Ashford Castle’s oldest section dates to 1228 — the de Burgo family’s fortification of the Lough Corrib’s southern shoreline in the first generation of the Norman presence in Connacht, in the understanding that this specific point on the largest lake in the Irish Republic commanded the water approach from the west and the land approach from the south simultaneously. The centuries between 1228 and the present have added to the castle in the manner of great buildings that survive: each generation building within the logic of what came before while adding the logic of their own requirements, so that the current structure is simultaneously the thirteenth-century fortification, the eighteenth-century manor house extension, the nineteenth-century Guinness family improvement, and the twenty-first-century Red Carnation renovation — a building whose chronological layers are legible to the visitor who pays attention and invisible to the visitor who came only for the spa.

The Red Carnation Hotel group’s restoration, completed in phases between 2013 and 2019, brought the castle to the Forbes Five-Star standard without smoothing away the specific roughness that a building of this age produces in its stone walls and its corridor proportions and its ceiling heights that vary by century rather than by design specification. This restraint is the restoration’s most significant achievement: the hotel that emerges from a castle renovation without destroying what makes it a castle is doing something considerably more difficult than the hotel that replaces the castle’s character with the international luxury hotel standard. Ashford has not been so replaced. The stone is the stone it was in 1228. The walls are as thick as they were built. The corridors are as steep as the hill they follow.

The Falconry

The Ashford Castle falconry school — the Ireland School of Falconry, operated from the castle’s grounds — is the most consistently praised experience at the property and the most specifically Irish of any luxury hotel activity available in the country. The Harris hawks that the falconers work with are flown in the estate’s woodland, where the bird’s hunting behaviour in a natural woodland environment produces the specific encounter — the hawk leaving the handler’s glove, disappearing into the tree cover, and returning at the whistle to the glove again — that the falconry tradition in its medieval Irish form practiced across this same landscape for the same purpose. The falconer’s knowledge of each bird’s specific character, and the way this knowledge is communicated to the guest in the sixty minutes of the demonstration that makes the hawk-on-glove experience genuinely informative rather than generically photogenic, is what makes the Ashford falconry session memorable rather than merely impressive.

Lough Corrib

Lough Corrib is the largest lake in the Republic of Ireland — forty-four kilometres from south to north, containing three hundred and sixty-five islands (the Irish count of islands, like the Bahamian count of beaches, is approximately accurate depending on what constitutes an island), and supporting the brown trout population whose quality made Ashford Castle’s ghillie service — the professional fishing guide who knows the lake’s pools, hatches, and seasonal behaviour — the primary reason that the international angling community has been making the journey to County Mayo since the nineteenth century. The May fly hatch on Lough Corrib, in the third and fourth weeks of May when the Ephemeroptera larvae that have been developing on the lake’s limestone bed for two years simultaneously emerge as adults and the brown trout that have been waiting for this event rise throughout the lake in the feeding frenzy that the hatch produces — this specific event, lasting perhaps ten days, is the finest dry fly fishing available in Europe and the reason that the May fishing season at Ashford is booked by the same families returning year after year for the same event.

The Rooms

Eighty-three rooms and suites across the castle’s various wings — each different from every other, reflecting the different centuries of the building’s accumulation rather than the uniform template that a purpose-built hotel produces. The rooms in the oldest sections have the stone walls and the window embrasures and the ceiling heights of the medieval construction. The rooms in the Victorian extension have the proportions and the fireplace sizes of the Guinness family’s nineteenth-century occupancy. The suites in the more recently renovated sections have the contemporary comfort that the Red Carnation renovation installed without the contemporary aesthetic that would have made them invisible from each other.

Request the lake-facing rooms at booking — the view across Lough Corrib from the castle’s southern elevation, with the wooded islands visible in the foreground and the Mayo hills on the far shore, is the view that the castle was positioned to command in 1228 and that the guest in the lake-facing room receives as the primary window on the morning.

Practical Details

83 rooms and suites. Room-only and dinner/bed/breakfast rates. Ireland West Airport Knock approximately 45 minutes. Galway city approximately 30 minutes. Rates from approximately €500-€800 per night. The May fishing week — book in January for the May hatch, which fills the property’s fishing programme months in advance

Book Ashford Castle direct — County Mayo’s extraordinary hotel above Lough Corrib, in continuous operation since 1228.