Dundrum Castle, Northern Ireland Resort, Great Britain
Rating: 7,9/10 ( votes)  Dundrum Castle is another monument of medieval architecture in Northern Ireland, which has come down to us in not very good condition. The castle is located in the small County Down, and a tour of the ruins is most often part of a tour of major cities and the surrounding area of the county. For example, the administrative center of the county, the city of Daupatrick is famous for the fact that there is the supposed burial place of St. Patrick - the Irish spiritual patron.
The castle itself has nothing to do with St. Patrick, and is located away from the urban area. However, there are regular sightseeing buses from both Downpatrick and Bangor, the largest city in the county.
Initially, the castle was called Rath, founded by a Norman knight who seized several lands of Ireland in 1177. The Rat castle at that time, according to the surviving chronicle information, was a small wooden fortification, which, apart from the stockade, was surrounded by nothing. The stone fortress wall, according to the same chronicles, was built only ten years later.
Since 1210, the owner of the castle has changed, and its reconstruction begins completely in stone. According to the surviving paintings from different eras, as well as the current state of the ruins, historians unanimously claim that Dundrum was an absolutely atypical building for Ireland, therefore there are several theories that the owners of the already stone castle were well-born Welsh.
Over the long centuries of history, the castle has changed almost dozens of owners, and for a long time it was owned by the state. For most of this time, the territory of the architectural monument was practically not followed, and the once majestic castle was slowly collapsing. The situation was corrected only in 1954, when now the ruins of Dandrum Castle were included in the list of specially protected architectural objects.
Now a tour of the ruins of the castle takes no more than half an hour, twenty minutes of which the guide briefly tells the history of the emergence of this architectural monument. The rest of the time, guests are given an independent examination and photo. Among the surviving objects of the castle, the half-preserved keep and the observation deck at its top are popular.
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