Ashford Castle
Where Lough Corrib meets Lough Mask, on the Galway side of the county line at Cong, the towers of Ashford Castle rise over the water. A Burke fort of 1228 became a French-style hunting lodge for the Brownes, then a Victorian Gothic palace for the Guinness family, and since 1939 a five-star hotel where John Ford shot The Quiet Man. From Clonbur it is a few kilometres east.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Ericci8996, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Ashford castle, Cong Abbey, Ashford Demesne (East) on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Burkes, Bingham and Brownes
The Anglo-Norman de Burgos built a castle on the edge of a monastic site here in 1228 and held it for more than three and a half centuries, until a fierce battle with Sir Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connaught, ended in a truce and, in 1589, the castle's surrender to Bingham, who added a fortified enclave inside it. Dominick Browne, of the family later ennobled as Oranmore and Browne, received the estate by royal grant in 1670 or 1678; in 1715 the Brownes built a hunting lodge in the manner of a seventeenth-century French chateau, and their double-headed eagles still stand on the roof. A branch of the family lived here in the late 1700s, and their agent Thomas Elwood in 1814.
The Guinness castle
Sir Benjamin Guinness bought Ashford in 1852 from the first Baron Oranmore and Browne through the Encumbered Estates Court. He added two large Victorian extensions, grew the estate to 26,000 acres, built roads and planted thousands of trees; William Wilde had the castle drawn for his book on the county. When he died in 1868 his son Arthur, Lord Ardilaun, went further in the neo-Gothic manner: a keen gardener, he laid out vast woodlands and rebuilt the whole west wing to designs by James Franklin Fuller and George Ashlin, joining the early eighteenth-century house to the towers.
The hotel and the film
The castle passed to Ardilaun's nephew Ernest Guinness and was sold in 1939 to Noel Huggard, whose family had been in the hotel trade at Waterville in Kerry since 1910; he opened it as a hotel known for its fishing and shooting. In 1951 John Ford brought John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara to make The Quiet Man, and the grounds and the village of Cong are much of the film. The castle has since stood in for the French court in the television series Reign. In September 2011 the owner, Gerry Barrett, had electric gates installed across a centuries-old public right of way over a bridge by the castle; 150 locals protested with councillors and the TD Éamon Ó Cuív, a High Court injunction was sought to stop them, and a landowner's case over the obstruction was heard that December.
Questions people ask
Is Ashford Castle in Galway or Mayo?
Who owned Ashford Castle?
Was The Quiet Man filmed at Ashford Castle?
Written from Wikipedia, "Ashford Castle" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.