Malahide Castle — Puck

OVERVIEW

Malahide Castle lies close to the village of Malahide, fourteen kilometres north of central Dublin, with 267 acres of remaining parkland around it forming the Malahide Demesne Regional Park. The estate began in 1185, when Richard Talbot, a knight who had come to Ireland with Henry II in 1174, was granted the lands; the family held it for nearly eight hundred years. The Oak Room and the Great Hall, which carries the Talbot family portraits, are the best-known rooms.

HISTORY

The castle passed out of Talbot hands in 1975. The Great Hall tradition holds that fourteen Talbot cousins breakfasted there on the morning of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and that none came back.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The tradition names several figures, of whom Puck is the best known: the Talbots' jester in the Tudor period, a man of about four feet who kept watch from one of the towers; in the story he fell in love with Lady Elenora Fitzgerald, held at the castle for her family's rebel sympathies, and was found stabbed outside the walls on a snowy December night, having said before he died that he would haunt the castle but harm no one while a male Talbot lived there. A hooded figure is also reported in the corridors near the old chapel. vetted = false — the tradition is long-standing and the castle is entirely real, but the accounts in circulation are ghost-tour and popular-book material rather than a dated document or the keeper's own record, and the entry says so rather than dressing it up.

VISITING

Guided tours of the castle for a fee; the demesne, gardens and butterfly house are open, with a café and shops in the courtyard.